Why I Left the Catholics, and Why We Misunderstand Them - Stephen Russell

You know, children make assumptions that they never hear from the adults. And so one time I asked a Protestant neighbor, "Why do you worship the devil?" Because I go to the Catholic Church and up front is Jesus on the cross being crucified for us to take away our sins. Wow. And so, well, that's what we do. That's what we believe. They must they must worship the devil. Wow. No one ever said that. They and if a priest had heard me say that, he would have, "Steven, no, that's not right." Wow. And this is one reason we should have good, solid, clear teaching, uh, because you're going to especially when you're young, but even adults can make assumptions that just aren't really part of the faith.

So, Mr. Russell, you teach church history and so and other topics at Faith Builders, and, um, been there for many years, but there's a part of your story that I don't really know, and that is you were raised Catholic, at least initially, and obviously you're not that anymore, but tell me about that.

Well, I could say I'm Catholic with a small c, so I'm not Roman Catholic. Um, and I believe, uh, I believe all Christians should follow the great tradition, and I would see that as what Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and Anabaptists teach as foundational, one thing being the creed, the Nicene creed. But so I think there's a kind of connectedness among these different groups, that there are differences, but I also want us to recognize there are similarities. So, I was born and raised Catholic. I was baptized at a big Catholic church just outside of Washington, D.C., as a child, uh, an infant. Um, I think the rule is you get baptized on the eighth day, I think within the eighth day or on the eighth day.

And I went to Catholic school, at least until my family moved to an area where there wasn't one, but as long as they could send me to Catholic school, they did. And, uh, all of this really shaped me, and I think in mostly in a good way.

Um, and that's one reason I brought up the great tradition. Um, the core belief about who God is and who Jesus is and what man's need is, all of those groups, um, unless they've drifted away from it, like, like, uh, the Unitarians, uh, or like, um, some Protestant groups that are becoming more liberal in their Christianity, if you unless you drift away from it, some of the foundational ideas are the same. So I was raised in a setting where I knew that, um, all of us are sinners and that there's only one way to God, and that's through Jesus, what He did for us. Now, in the Catholic Church, the way the biggest way you get grace is through the sacraments, so I was already Christian because I had been baptized, okay?

Okay. So that affects things. So when you say the sacraments, you that would include getting baptized as an infant. Yes. The Mass as well? Well, the Mass is where you have communion, or they might or maybe, to use the more Catholic term, the Eucharist. And the Eucharist is just a Greek word that means Thanksgiving. But that's where you literally receive Jesus, the bread and the wine in the Mass. The priest, um, says, "This is my body," and then he says something similar about the wine, and they become the body and blood of Christ. And so you are literally receiving Jesus. Ooh, that's okay. So that's transubstantiation, right? That's where they would teach, "This isn't just a symbol.

This is the actual thing." Yes. Okay. And, uh, the Orthodox would be the same. They don't use the word, uh, transubstantiation. They kind of don't like it, and they say it's all a mystery, uh, but they say the same thing happens, that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, but they will say, "We don't know when that happens," whereas a Catholic would say, "When the priest says, he picks up the bread and he says, 'This is my body.'" At that moment, it becomes the body and blood of Christ. Interesting. But anyway, um, so there were good things, but grace comes mostly it can come otherwise, but it comes mostly through the sacraments.

And I see some problems there. Well, but before we get into that, let's back let's get into, like, what did it mean for you, like, to be a Catholic, and then, like, how did it affect your life? Like, what was church life like? Well, and I'm trying to say there were good things there, okay, as well as some issues.

And I went to Catholic school, and, you know, children make assumptions that they never hear from the adults. And so one time I asked a Protestant neighbor, "Why do you worship the devil?" Because I go to the Catholic Church and up front is Jesus on the cross being crucified for us to take away our sins. Wow. And so, well, that's what we do. That's what we believe. They must worship the devil. Wow. No one ever said that. And if a priest had heard me say that, he would have, "Steven, no, that's not right." Wow. Because Catholics believe that people like us who haven't left or like you, I left the Catholic Church, but people like you who haven't left but really do believe the right things, you're connected to Christ, okay?

But when you leave like I did, that's a problem. But anyway, so I just wanted to say, I just made an assumption that it was wrong, and, you know, I've heard our Amish and Mennonite children make some similar assumptions that they haven't been taught. And this is one reason we should have good, solid, clear teaching, because you're going to especially when you're young, but even adults can make assumptions that just aren't really part of the faith. So that was one little mistake I made, one big mistake I made. But no, it, um, I enjoyed being Catholic. It shaped me.

I understood what right is and what wrong is, and, um, I knew that our salvation comes through Jesus. Um, and so I would say it really shaped me well, and now there are some things that we would disagree with, like praying to saints or believing in purgatory.

And so some of those things, uh, did change for me when I left the Catholic Church, but you know what? The core beliefs, like the Nicene creed, I didn't change on that. And the Catholics, the Protestants, the Anabaptists, the Orthodox, we all believe that, um, or we should anyway. And, uh, so there were some things that I would say it basically shaped me in a good way.

When I became a teenager, like a lot of teenagers, I got rebellious, and so I decided when I'm old enough that I can make my own decisions, I'm going to leave, just because of this kind of restless rebelliousness that was in me, and in a lot of teenagers. But before that came to fruition, I went to a Baptist revival meeting because one of my classmates invited me, so I went.

That must have been a very different culture than what you were used to, like. Well, here's what I would say. I heard the same thing mostly but delivered a little more emphatically. And the one thing that was truly different, so I already know that we're saved by Jesus, and there's no other way. I knew that, but he said, "You have to make this personal." And because Catholics baptize children or babies, that's not really at least in my day. This was when I was 20. Actually, the conversion happened at 17, and I joined the Beechy Church when I was 20, but so when at when I was 17, um, at least back then, there wasn't any real call to a conscious conversion.

I don't know. They might have something where they do that nowadays, but so I just want to say I haven't been in the Catholic Church for, I mean, a member for more than 50 years, so I don't know if that's something that they're consciously working with or not, but that was the one difference. And so I gave my life to the Lord, and the next morning when I woke up, I knew two things, and I would say that God works with each person when He calls him to conversion where he needs to be worked with, and it's going to be different with different people. This was during the, um, Vietnam War, and I was a very patriotic young man, and all of a sudden I knew that God doesn't want His people killing anyone, not even for a good cause like the Vietnam War or for His country.

I just knew that. Right off the bat, you just. Yes, because God works with you where you need to be worked. That's interesting. That was one. Number two, I wanted to serve the Lord. Well, how does a good Catholic boy serve the Lord? Oh, I mean, what, become a priest or something? Yeah. So I decided I wanted to be a priest.

Okay. I wrote to the bishop and told him I wanted to be a priest, and he lost my letter. And the reason I know this is for a long period of time we weren't hearing anything, and my mother especially was concerned because I'm of the age group where your parents were telling everyone, "You got to go to college."

It's in the late '60s, early '70s, and beyond a bit. Um, they wanted something better for me, and for their mindset, that meant something you can do that's beyond that requires a college degree. So my mom really wanted me to do that, and we're not hearing from the bishop, so there was a new community college right down the road from where I lived, so she finally convinced me to go there, and so I signed up, and I got a little bit of money, a little bit of a grant, etc. And then the bishop writes a letter back, or probably his secretary, I should say, "We lost your letter. We found it. Yes, you can come to St.

Mary's Seminary College." Well, I wrote back, and I said, "Well, I'm already in college," so, you know, I hadn't started, but I'm already registered at the community college, so I went there two years, and it was a really wonderful experience. It was a new college in a backward kind of part of Maryland, so most of the people there were church people and mostly people who had had a conscious conversion, so it was like being part of a youth group.

And so that was a good two years, and during that two years, if you are going to go to be a priest, the bishop appoints you a vocations director. The vocations director decided, without telling me at the time, that I was too conservative, so he directed me to St. Mary's College Seminary because it was kind of liberal-ish, and those kinds of schools were dying out at the time or a little bit later anyway. Halfway between that was in Baltimore. Halfway between my house and Baltimore, there was a conservative seminary that was part of another college. I don't know what would have happened if I had gone there, but I don't know. I just do what He tells me, so I go to St.

Mary's in Baltimore, and I got discouraged. I don't know if I got depressed or not, but I got discouraged by their approach. It was very open-ended, so what do we believe? And I couldn't handle it, and at the end of the semester, I didn't go back. I finished the semester and didn't go back, and I was very discouraged. I didn't get a job for a while. I was just trying to figure out what's up.

And during that time, I talked with many Christian friends, and the ones that I'd say helped me the most were my Beechy Amish friends. Not that they necessarily had a definite answer, but we had the best discussions. One friend of mine, when I told him, "You know, there are certain things that I believe as a Catholic, and I don't want to leave those things. One would be that I receive Jesus in the communion." "Oh, why do you let stuff like that bother you?" "Well, that's not helpful."

My Beechy Amish friends may not have given a clear answer, but we had some good talks. And then I went to vacation Bible school at the Beechy Church. Wait, so there was a Beechy Amish Church or something close by, and that's how you had connections with them? Well, the reason I had connections was the Beechy Church started its own school about the time I went to high school, and they let the people that were already in high school finish the public high school, but anybody else that started in their new church school, they would go through high school in their church school. So there were people in my high school that were Beechy and some other people, some other, like, conservative Mennonite, conservative conference Mennonites, and I guess I'd say more liberal Mennonites.

And so once I got to ninth grade, that's where they tended to start coming. There was a grade school that the state ran kind of for the Amish and the Mennonites. Anybody could go, but it was located in the heart of our people's location, and that's mostly who went there. And if you wanted to go to you could go there up to the ninth grade, and then in ninth grade, if you wanted high school, you switched to the public high school. If you didn't but weren't 16, they had, I think, up to 10th grade, and at 16 you could quit, but not before.

So I got to in ninth grade it was I'll just tell kind of a funny story. In ninth grade, all of a sudden, these people showed up, new people that were Beechy Amish and conservative Mennonites. In a science class, something amazing happened.

The teacher said, "How many of you don't believe in evolution?" Well, all the hands that went up, I think, were the Beechy and the conservative Mennonites. So the question seemed strange to me. See, Catholics teach that God created, but you can it's open-ended whether you believe He used evolution or He used special creation. It's open-ended, but so it wasn't a question for me, and so I was I thought the question is strange, and then I saw these people raising their hands, but what the only reason I think I remember it is He started mocking them. Oh. And so I was I thought the question is strange, and I was amazed at the people that were raising their hands, but I was offended at His attitude, you know?

And so anyway, in ninth grade I so ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade, I was in high school with Beechys and conservative Mennonites and some of the more liberal Mennonites. And so that's where I got to know them, and I knew before I gave my life to the Lord, I knew they were non-resistant, and I would tease them about that.

And you do dumb things when you're a teenager. I would talk about the Amish Revolution. For instance, there is no such thing, but I like to kind of poke fun at them. Anyway, but they accepted it. I talked to them later after I became Beechy, and I said, "Oh, you know, did I offend you?" They said, "No, we understood that you were just having fun, and you weren't offended by it." But anyway, so the next morning after I clearly gave my life to the Lord, I just knew this is wrong, not because of them. I just knew it's wrong. Then after going to community college and then for one semester to the seminary college and quitting and then interacting with my Beechy friends, I went to vacation Bible school, and I knew that they were non-resistant, and so I asked a minister, "How do you join this church?"

And he said, "Well, maybe you should come a little longer than, you know, just a short period like this." And so I started going to church there, and I started I jumped into the instruction class. It was about halfway over. Oh, wow. Okay, so at this point, you had tried the one semester at the Catholic seminary and got discouraged by that. It was seminary college, yeah. Or seminary college. Yeah. This is just interesting. Like, it's an interesting path to get you to this point, but you're basically saying, "I'm searching for something more than what I experienced there. Maybe I should try this," basically. Well, I don't think I said, but I should bring this in.

My vocations director oh, I did say this. He thought I was too conservative. Oh, right. And then he quit. So he wanted to what he said was he said this to my dad. I found it out through my dad, not from him directly, but he told my dad, "I'm too conservative. This will round me out." Well, I tell people, "It did round me out. It rounded me out of the Catholic Church because I could not believe what I was hearing there at this liberal seminary college." So for this guy, his strategy for you kind of backfired. Well, it well, and he told my dad, "Those people are not intellectual enough. He'll leave." And I say, "He might be right."

Interesting. It hasn't happened yet, 50 years later, plus, 50 plus. How about that? The truth that we have is a gem, and I just want our people to know it better and to know why it's so important. And you know what? We need people. We need all kinds of people. We need some who are on the intellectual side, and we need people who farm and maybe aren't that intellectual, but they have immense wisdom. I have learned so much from people who wouldn't read the kind of books I do, but they have earthly wisdom. Earthy. Let me say it that way. Earthy wisdom. Yeah, yeah. And I have learned immensely from those people. We need both.

We need the whole spectrum. So that's what he thought he was doing. Anyway, so I joined the church, and one of the things that I thought I saw well, let me say it this way. The reason I thought I saw stability we don't have that as strongly as I thought we do, but anyway, there is a certain kind of stability there, but we're also a little bit we don't always understand well who we are and why we are. Yeah, because isn't that one of the points the Catholics would say is like, "Oh, no, no. We have stability. We haven't changed for 2,000 years, and we've been this, you know, solid institution?" They do have stability, and so you see, but I went to this liberal seminary, and you can find liberal bishops and liberal priests, and so that can be a little bit shaking, but I would say the vast majority of Catholic bishops and priests in the United States are conservative and stable.

Okay. But my experience just bothered me so badly when I saw, "Ooh, there are people that don't even know seemingly don't even know what it means to be a Catholic." And you know, who knows? Maybe if I'd stayed there two more years and then gone to the seminary see, that's a seminary college, and then I would have gone to the strictly seminary part. For the priest. For the priesthood part, yeah. So it would have been this was training for those who want to go to the seminary. So you would have had four years at least in preparation to become a priest. Yes. Boy, how your life could have been different, you know? Well, and that's why I mentioned that seminary that was partway between where I lived and the seminary that I went to.

I actually visited it part of the way through my seminary experience, and I was amazed, and later on, I just wondered, "Well, I wonder what would have happened if I had been there." But I take this as God's providence. God helped me to see the Catholic Church, or at least an aspect of it.

And also, like I said, I clearly knew without nobody told me this, but I just knew, well, God's Spirit told me this, that God doesn't want His people killing anyone, so that was huge, and that was a big part. So the stability, the non-resistance, and there's something that I couldn't have identified then, but in my many years since then, I have come to realize that one of our strengths as Anabaptists and we have it in varying degrees, and we could be losing it in some places is a definite sense of community, and that is supposed to be part of being part of the body of Christ. Catholics had it. I'm only saying I can't answer for sure now, but I do have some Catholic friends who love Chesterton, whom I also love, and they have, I think, a very strong sense of community as well.

I don't know if it's broadly there. Like, I think it was for me when I was a teenager and a 20-something, but well, a young or just 20, but that was part of what drew me, but I couldn't express it back then. But I sensed community here, and I never sensed it with my Protestant friends. It was too much each one of them deciding what they believed and kind of deciding where they're going to go to church, etc., and they didn't have a clear sense of history or doctrine like the Nicene Creed, so it was kind of an open-ended thing, and that never appealed to me. It still doesn't. Interesting. Still doesn't. Yeah, because that was one of the questions I had, right?

If you're looking for something more, why not go to a Protestant church down the road? I mean, I'm sure there would have been a ton of options to choose from, you know? But you go Beechy Amish, which just doesn't seem like the normal path people would take. I don't know if that maybe that's presumptuous to say. Well, no, but you're right. But, you know, it seems like that would be the direction to go, and you didn't. Well, I loved my Baptist friends. That's where I went to that church and heard a revivalist.

I loved them, and I interacted with them a lot, and a lot of them were the people at the community college that I kind of felt I was a part of a youth group with, but I never was drawn. I never sensed community. I couldn't have told you back then, but I never sensed real community there. Now, I'm not saying there was absolutely none, but it was pretty loose. So in another interview that we had, I mentioned that there was a man there who got divorced and remarried, and there was nothing they could do about it, you know? So it was that kind of it was very open-ended. That never appealed to me. Like I said, I couldn't have told you.

That didn't appeal to me, but the sense of community at the Beechy Church did. It's been from growing and learning more about doctrine and the Anabaptist understanding of what the church is that I came to realize that's part of what drew me. So it was stability, non-resistance, and the community. And the stability includes things like we expect things of you, and at least a young Catholic like me back then, it wasn't hard to join the Beechy Church because the Catholic Church expected things of me. You know, you don't eat meat on Friday, and you fast before you take communion, and there were just various things that they expected. And so it was different things in the Beechy Church, but it wasn't a strange thing to me that the church actually required something of you, whereas for a lot of evangelicals, the church can't require anything of you.

And so it didn't bother it didn't bother me a bit. So in a way that could have almost been, I don't know, a familiarity or like a good thing. Yeah, of course. Well, yeah, of course, the church requires something of how I live, act, you know, etc. Fill in the blank, yeah. Yeah. And of course, to this day where I go to church, we wear solids, solid colors. That doesn't bother me a bit.

Now, it wasn't explained to me well. I think later I started to realize not that you not that the rule has to be solid colors, but why there is some kind of rule. So in Mennonite churches, it's different, but still, they have some kind of rules about how we dress. So I came to understand that better as time went on, but I didn't care. I wanted to be with people who were stable and were non-resistant, and so if they had a few rules that I didn't think they explained terribly well, I didn't care. I wanted the good stuff, you know? That's so interesting. So you go through the instruction class, and you get baptized, but see, in this case, this makes you like an actual Anabaptist.

Well, I'm a real Anabaptist. The real deal, as in you were rebaptized. I was rebaptized, and the class had already been halfway done, so they didn't know what to do with me. So they baptized all the others, and they said, "Well, we want you to go and talk to each of the ministers so we can hear your faith," which we didn't hear some of the first part, and I agreed with everything that we believed. So it was no problem, and after I did it, they said, "Oh, yeah, we're going to baptize you." So I got baptized separately, but soon after, the others had been baptized. It just took a little time till I got around to all those ministers.

You know, we have multiple ministry, so I forget how many I had to go talk to. It was at least four, I'm pretty sure. So yeah, after I did that, they were okay. I was okay with it, and I got baptized. And here we are, you know, 50 years later or so. And who knows? I might leave like that Catholic my vocations director said, "One of these days, he's going to leave." Well, who knows?

Okay, so I'm going to do a slight pivot here in the story. It seems to me and this is probably oversimplification, but I like to hear you engage with this. It seems to me that our people, the Anabaptists, the Mennonites, the Amish, simplify the Catholic Church and don't really understand Catholic theology that much. I think that's fair, at least I know for myself. I certainly don't. Do you think that's the case, for one thing? And in what ways would you say we're actually the same with the Catholics, which might be a little controversial, but I'd like to hear you engage with that.

Well, you are right. I think I mentioned it at the beginning that a large percentage of what I learned as a Catholic, I still believe, and although we may not emphasize the creed, the Nicene or the Apostles' Creed, my instruction class booklet had the Apostles' Creed in it. Now, I wasn't at the beginning, so I don't know how they used that, but that obviously says that that particular church saw this as valid.

It's not something they said in church, but it was a valid part of our belief. And like I said this in another podcast that we had, that the Amish still sing a rhymed version of the Apostles' Creed. So our early forefathers didn't they believed in the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, and so that's a foundational point. We're Trinitarians. We believe Jesus is fully God and fully man, and we believe that it's only through Him that we receive salvation. That's in the creed.

So those foundational things were the same. I don't think I ever prayed to the saints, or at least not much. I can't remember that I did, so that wasn't a big issue for me, but that is something. Okay, so the Catholics do pray to Mary and the saints. They do not worship either.

I absolutely yeah, I've heard some people tell me that. No. Different Catholics. They're like, "You guys misunderstand. We're not worshipping" You misunderstand. Okay, if I was having a problem, I might come to you and say, "Would you pray for me?" Right?

Yeah. Is that valid? Yeah. Do you know what the Catholics do when they pray to Mary? Please do explain this because I'm confused on this whole thing, right? She is the human other than Jesus who is closest to God. She's the one that bore the incarnated God. Okay. Okay, she's closest to God in their minds anyway. Yeah, okay. And they would say that in a very real way, she is also the truest representation of what it means to be a human. Jesus is clearly that, and I don't think I'm misrepresenting them. I think they would say that she also is the truest example because she always obeyed God. When God said, "I want you to bear through Gabriel, I want you to bear the Messiah," she said, "Well, how can that be?

Because I don't know a man," and it was explained to her, and she said, "Well, your will be done." That is the perfect model from the Catholic perspective of how all of us ought to become more and more what it means to be a human.

So why not ask okay, I can ask you to pray for me, and a Catholic would say, "Yep, that makes sense." Why not ask the best human around to pray for me? So the Catholic oh, so that's what's going on there, right? That's what's going on there. The Catholic the prayer to Mary I'm going to say what they say. The prayer to Mary is, "Hail, Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, all of which comes from Scripture." Then they say, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." So they're asking Mary to intercede for them, and they're thinking about what specifically they want her to intercede for.

They are not worshipping her. This is clearly taught. I never thought I was worshipping any of the saints or Mary. So that's a major, major misunderstanding there then. And I think that's unfortunate because disagreeing with someone's theological position, that's completely fine, but misrepresenting them well, there is a reason too that we sometimes do misrepresent it. Well, explain that. Yeah, I'll explain that. Yeah.

I was an American Catholic. Some of our people have been missionaries in Central America and South America, and there are true Catholics there, but there are also Catholics who have mixed their Indian paganism, and I mean, it's from way back. And so if you have worked with those people, you can come across people who really do worship Mary. And that's a problem, but the Catholic Church would also say that's a problem. The Catholic Church would say that's a problem, and the official teaching is what I just said, and in the States, as far as I know, with a lot of people coming from Central and South America, maybe now there are people in Catholic churches that maybe I don't know that have the wrong understanding, and it's not completely wrong down in South America, Central America, South America.

It's part of the Catholic Church that have this kind of belief, and others don't. So the official teaching is what I said, and you only worship God, and that's God the Father, Son, and Spirit. So I just want to say that I've talked to people who our own people who have been missionaries, and they will tell me what they've come up against, and I said, "At least when I was a young person, you would I don't think you would have ever met that in the American Catholic Church. I think they taught clearly that we worship only God. We do pray to saints and to Mary to intercede for us, but we don't worship them." Yeah, see, and that's I'm glad you used that as an example because I think that quickly could become a case of just oversimplifying something, and yes, we disagree with it.

Of course, we disagree with it, but misleading or misrepresenting what they actually say, that's just not even that's not fair, you know? And then it's not helpful because then one day you may realize, "Oh, they actually say this and not this," and then you'll be really confused like, "Wait a minute. I got this all wrong," because I don't know how many times I've heard that throughout my life. "Oh, they worship Mary." And then yeah, and I think it was from you actually that I learned, "No, that's actually not true at all. Like, the Catholic Church does not say that." It's like, "Oh, whoa." It's almost disorienting because it's something you hear so much, you just assume that's the way it is, and then it's like, "Wait, what else did I get wrong?"

You know? Yes. But now, I do think they go overboard with Mary, but sure, yeah. But I also think, you know, the Gospel says that you're going to be well-known from now on, and I think we kind of hit the other extreme. So I think they go overboard, and I think we go overboard ignoring her. I think there's some really good I think we could have a good either sermon or devotional on how Mary is a good example for us, just like the Catholics say, without getting into the bad kind of territory. The veneration of the Mary. Yeah, the veneration or the praying to her. We don't have to go there, but I wonder I honestly think this would be a place where maybe we could just learn a little bit from the Catholics that God really wants Mary to be honored, and she can be a model for us, but I don't want to say too much I mean, I don't want to go too far there because then I don't go too far there, but maybe some people will misunderstand.

But okay, so you did say where do we disagree? That would be a key issue, but we also agree with them. We are not Protestant for a reason. During the Reformation, the Catholic Church would have been what's called synergistic. They would have believed that Jesus that God through Jesus did everything necessary for our salvation, but we have to accept it. Now, with infant baptism, it kind of messes that thing up, but anyway, if there is a person who wasn't baptized, they would expect him to accept that all the grace that he needs comes through Jesus to save him.

The Protestants reenlivened a teaching from Augustine called monergism that not only did God do everything we need for salvation, but you can't choose it. He has chosen some for salvation and others for damnation. That's monergism. God does everything.

This actually means that even if you hear the Gospel and you wish that you could accept it, if you're not one of the elect, you can't accept it. And this is coming from guys like Calvin, Luther, who are Luther, Calvin, Zwingli. They all accepted this aspect of Augustine that the Catholic Church never accepted. They believed a lot of what Augustine taught, but they did not accept that they did believe were badly damaged, and so some of them would say things like, "We need provenient grace. We need grace before we can respond," but if you believe in provenient grace, that means that when the Gospel is preached, God sends provenient grace with it so that those people now can freely choose it or reject it.

So it's still the Catholics would have said, "If you hear the Gospel as an adult, whether you need if you need grace, God gives it with the hearing of the Gospel. If you don't need it, you're not damaged enough so you can actually say yes or no," but they would believe that you could say if a Muslim heard the Gospel, he could say yes or no to it, and it's his choice.

The Lutherans, the Anglicans, and the Calvinists all believed that God chose you to be elect, and it's nothing they say this very clearly. It doesn't have anything to do with how you're living or how someone else is living. You could be living a worse life and be elect, and you will eventually respond correctly. I mean, you will eventually live right. The other person might be trying to obey Jesus, but if he's not elect, that doesn't matter. It's completely God's pleasure, the pleasure of his good will, whether he chooses you for salvation or damnation.

Now, my point, though, was that the Anabaptists did not agree with that. That's why they never joined. They would have stayed within that little area at least right with the Catholics. They agreed with the Catholics, and how about that? Yeah. They also agreed with the Catholics on the Apocrypha. What the Lutherans and the Zwinglians and the Calvinists eventually called the Apocrypha, they only accepted the Old Testament in Hebrew. The Apocrypha now, we have since discovered pieces of it in Hebrew, but at the time, all we knew about was in Greek, so they only accepted the Old Testament that was in Hebrew, which is what we accept today, but the early Anabaptists accepted what they would have seen as the whole Old Testament, and the Catholics did too.

The Catholics made a clear statement in the Council of Trent. Up until that time, the clear statement was only what is in the New Testament. Everybody agreed on that, but Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Anabaptists, but nobody had just absolutely churchwide said, "This is what's in the Old Testament," and so the Catholics made that very clear in their church council, the Council of Trent, which cleared up a lot of the abuses, maybe all of the abuses that were part of the reason for the Protestant Reformation.

They clarified teaching, "This is what we believe." They clarified the limits of the canon of the Bible, etc., and they did okay, it might not be what we wish they had done, but they did do, I would say, a good job on cleaning up a thing that had become a system that had a lot of corruption in it. For instance, a lot of priests some priests went through university, and so they were relatively well-educated, or they were well-educated, and those kinds of priests usually could preach. A lot of priests, though, especially out in the countryside, were they were taught by the present priest as a boy, and he did as good a job as he could, and they might then go to a local monastery and get a little bit more and then get ordained by the bishop, but it was a thinner kind of education because think about it.

I might know Latin well enough to read the service, but I might not know it well enough to really teach the next guy, the young guy, all that it means. I might be able to teach him some, but there might be some words I really can't translate. In other words, I think when a person doesn't go to university and back in the Middle Ages, when a person didn't go to university, his education to become a priest, which included learning Latin, was not as good and over time would get not as it got worse and worse, and one of the reforms that the Council of Trent did was they recognized it actually says that some priests don't understand very well, and if they're willing to be corrected, we will send a well-educated priest there to help them and then to help them become what they ought to be, but if they're not willing, they can't preach they can't be a priest anymore there.

I don't know exactly what all happened, but they recognized there are guys out there who are not well enough educated, and so they didn't just do that where they sent somebody to help them get better, but they also required every bishop to establish a seminary so that everybody who becomes a priest gets, in essence, a college education. I'm not saying that a college education is what makes a person better, but these guys had to know their doctrine. They had to understand Latin. This is what they're going to read. This is what they're going to say in church, and if a church member says, "What does this mean?" he needs to understand, okay? So the reason for the seminary education wasn't because a college-educated person is better, but no, he can understand what he's supposed to present to the people better, supposedly, and I do think it worked.

I do think that the priests after the Reformation or during the Reformation and after learned much better how to present the faith. In fact, I would say that whereas in the Middle Ages, almost all Europeans were self-professed Catholic Christians, I would say that there was clearly a mixture of beliefs that weren't the best. I would say that and historians, I think, would agree with this, church historians, that from the Reformation on, at least until we get into the struggles that come with the Enlightenment, both Protestants and Catholics understood their faith better because their priests and their ministers were better educated, knew how to talk to their people, their lay people better, and they also started having catechism.

Both did, Catholics and Protestants. So if you want to know what the faith is, they were even though they baptized children, all the Protestants baptized children in the Reformation, and the Catholics obviously did, so they still saw the need to teach them catechism or to teach their faith, and so I think most church historians would agree that sometime in the Reformation on until the struggles that come with the Enlightenment, you had European Christians who at least understood their faith better than before. This is really what Christianity is.

This isn't. And in the Middle Ages, at least for a lot of them, it was mixed, and it's partly because the priests that were taught by a previous priest over a period of time, those that tends to be country priests, they're not going to be able to present the faith as well, so a better-educated clergy, I think, did a better job.

So I want to take that and bring it up to you today. So something I've noticed recently, and maybe it's just me, but it seems like this is becoming more common, is people from our churches, the Anabaptists, going and joining Catholic, Orthodox, the high church traditions, I guess you could say, and I'm really curious about that. I think one of the appeals there, at least that I've heard people say, is these churches have the historic faith. They go all the way back to the beginning, and we want that. We want to be a part of that.

So I would ask you, what do you make of that, and then how do we deal with the Anabaptists also making a pretty similar claim, maybe using different language, but saying, "No, I think we're actually the historically accurate faith"?

How do we engage with those differences? Yeah, I'm not even sure where to go with that because it's kind of hard for my head to untangle all of that. Well, you're right. Part of it is some people who are seeing they want that connection all the way back, and the Catholics and the Orthodox clearly claim that. The Anglicans, in a similar way, claim that, and the Lutherans and the Reformed, they would have said during the Reformation that we are plugging into the church that still was teaching clarity or the truth and clarity with the early church fathers, so they would say there was a lot of problem in between. They didn't say it was all bad, but there was a lot of problem in the Middle Ages, and so they really looked back to the church fathers to justify their positions, and Augustine, his teaching of monergism, definitely appealed to them.

Okay, so that's true. There's other things as well, and I'm going to name some, and so if I need to come back and I forget what I didn't talk about, but one of the things is I mentioned when I joined the Beechy Church, I thought I saw stability there, and I did, but I found out later it wasn't quite as stable as I thought, and I think we conservative Anabaptists don't understand who we are and what our faith is as clearly as we should, and we emphasize and this is good, we emphasize faith in Jesus.

Yes, but which Jesus? Do you know that in Galatians and in 2 Corinthians, it says there's another Jesus, there's another Gospel, there's another Spirit? So which Jesus?

It's too simplistic to just say it's Jesus and me, so I wish we understood and the early Anabaptists did a pretty good job on this. I wish we understood our faith, and I wish we understood that all of church history has something to say to us, both positively and negatively, and so part of the reason isn't just that some of these churches have a good claim to coming from the very beginning and all the way up through till today.