From JUDAISM to SCIENTISM to Catholicism

[Denise]

GOODBYE JUDAISM, FAREWELL SCIENTISM, HELLO CATHOLICISM

A Spiritual Journey from Jerusalem to Rome

September 2000
By Jeff Morrow

Jeff Morrow is a senior at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is a leader of the campus chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ and is heavily involved in his local Catholic parish.

Although I’m only 21, I’ve done a good deal of traveling and have had a number of adventures — from doing work as a health-care volunteer in the rural mountains of Honduras, to preaching on university campuses in Spain and Macedonia, to hiking out from beneath the jungle canopy and beholding the Mayan ruins of Copán. I’ve run from an angry bull, defended myself against a knife-wielding assailant, and heard bombs dropping from planes just a few miles away. But I have to say that the greatest adventure of my life has been a spiritual adventure, and my most significant journey is the one my mind and soul have taken over the past dozen years. It’s a journey that started in Jerusalem and ended in Rome — with stops in Shrewsbury to meet Darwin and in Wittenberg to see Luther.

How did it happen that I started in Jerusalem? My father was a Jew and my mother was a Christian. The Christianity on my mother’s side was nominal, really, involving no doctrine and not even any Christian culture to speak of, apart from gifts at Christmas and candy at Easter. Church? The Bible? The name of Jesus? None of these entered the picture, not even the mention of a generic divinity. My father’s family, by contrast, contained believing practitioners of the Jewish faith and was culturally Jewish as well. So I came to identify myself with Judaism rather than with Christianity, since Judaism was really the only religion with which my family had made me acquainted. This was particularly so after my parents divorced when I was nine. My father remarried — a woman who was also a practicing Jew — and it was in their observant Conservative Jewish household that I was raised from the age of eleven. I practiced Judaism, but I didn’t believe in the contents of the Jewish faith. I was sure, like others of my friends who were Jewish, that one doesn’t need to believe in Judaism to consider oneself Jewish. We considered our Jewishness more of a cultural identification than a religious faith.

And anyway, there were problems with religious faith. My maternal grandfather, a thoughtful and inquisitive man with whom I loved to sit and talk, was my first guide into the world of the intellect, and he informed me that people had created religions because of their inability to cope with reality. My grandfather was a great believer in science, and he based his disbelief in God on the absence of empirical evidence: We couldn’t see, hear, smell, touch, or taste God. This meant that God’s existence was a fiction. Then my grandfather informed me that there was genuine, un-fictional knowledge of the nature of the universe available, and he explained to me the revolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin. Thus, between the covers of The Origin of Species I found my ticket for the first stage of my journey, from Jerusalem to Shrewsbury. Another great intellectual influence on me was my stepfather. My mother had also remarried, to a professor of social psychology, and with him, too, I eagerly discussed evolution. By the age of eleven, I was devouring books on evolution by Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Alfred Russell Wallace, and Stephen Jay Gould. Each time I picked up Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle I felt inspired to go off on adventures across the world, discovering clues to the origin of man and searching for truth. Evolutionary study, specifically within the field of primatology (the study of apes and monkeys), became one of my passions.

Meanwhile, I continued learning about Judaism in Hebrew school and I eventually had a bar mitzvah, where a Jewish boy becomes a man, demonstrated by study of Torah and celebrated with a wild party. This marked the end of my Jewish studies — or so I thought. I’d studied Judaism solely to learn more about my family’s culture. I continued to have an anti-supernatural bias, rejecting any explanations not in the realm of science. Science was my religion, and scientists like Hawking, Gould, and Darwin, were the Fathers of my faith. I decided that after high school I would attend Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and get a degree in biological anthropology, focusing on the study of the behavior and evolution of nonhuman primates. My path in life seemed straightforward. But my itinerary was about to change. Little did I know that I would soon be off to Wittenberg — at least, in spirit.

At the university my dormitory became the staging area for this next part of the journey. The Resident Assistant (a senior in charge of a dormitory corridor) was a talkative and friendly guy named Jason Shanks who was, it appeared, a Christian, and a member of a big interdenominational Christian organization called Campus Crusade for Christ. I steered clear of Jason, since I knew, thanks to my grandfather, that Christians were pretty much idiots — a bunch of blind-faith Bible-thumpers. But one day Jason and I got into a discussion of truth, of absolute truth as opposed to relative truth. The questions were: “Is there an objective reality or do we create our own subjective realities? Is there a Right and Wrong? Or did we humans invent those ideas?” At first I argued that reality is different for different people. After some discussion I realized I was confusing reality with the perception of reality. The table exists whether I perceive it or not. An object’s existence doesn’t depend upon its being perceived. Nor does belief entail reality: No matter how firmly I believe that I can fly, I will still hit the ground when I jump off a building. Jason showed me that my claim that absolute truth doesn’t exist is fallacious. My discussion with Jason went on for hours, and I began to conclude that, although he was a Christian, he wasn’t so irrational after all.

So I made this concession: “Okay, absolutes do exist, but only in the material realm. There is no absolute, objective morality.”

“Oh really? So then it’s not wrong to rape someone?”

This was a stunning counterpunch. The implications were enormous. Everyone I know, myself included, believes rape is wrong. But if there is no right or wrong, then how can rape be wrong? Wrong according to whom? If it’s merely wrong because society says so, then it can change with the changing views of a given society. It’s not really wrong in any absolute sense, only in a subjective, “we agree” sense — it’s just an opinion. So I had to admit there are absolute morals, but I hated doing it, because it meant there had to be an absolute moral law, and this implied an absolute moral lawgiver, even a Creator. We finished our discussion and Jason invited me to the weekly Campus Crusade Bible Study he led in the dorm. I agreed to go, but told him I would try my best to refute the idea that Jesus was God, and then disprove the existence of God.

When I got to the Bible study, I discovered it was co-led by a staff member of Campus Crusade, Biff Rocha. [Ed. Note: See Biff Rocha’s article “On Returning to Catholicism via Campus Crusade for Christ” in the March 1998 NOR.] The group was studying the resurrection of Jesus. Biff informed us, quoting from St. Paul, “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). I soon realized that all I had to do was disprove Jesus’ resurrection, and then Christianity would crumble.

So after that meeting I began to study the question independently, still secure in my anti-supernatural bias and sure that logical analysis would clear up the matter. But it was my own intellectual tools that now began to work against my expectations. My late stepfather had impressed upon me the importance of intellectual rigor and consistency, and his words came back to me now: “You don’t want to disbelieve some assertion because it sounds unbelievable based on your opinion — any fool can have an opinion. It is not so much the results you have to attack as it is the methods used in obtaining the results.” When I really looked at the methods by which I had arrived at my atheism, I began to see that I had followed a faulty process of thinking, the same which had led many people who admire science into assertions that are scientifically unfounded. I had really believed not so much in science as in Scientism, an ideological materialism which asserts that only the empirically verifiable is real. And now I realized that this doctrine is, like the doctrine of relativism, fallacious. If the only reality is that which is empirically verifiable, and if philosophy is not empirically verifiable, then Scientism, being a philosophy, is not demonstrably real.

I had to admit the possibility that the only adequate explanation for life, existence, and reality might be the supernatural one; if that were so, then a logical person would have to believe in the supernatural. I decided to look at the evidence and believe in the supernatural if the evidence called for it. So I began to read about the historical person, Jesus, as discussed by both Christian and non-Christian scholars.

I found extra-biblical evidence for Jesus’ existence as well as biblical evidence showing that He claimed to be God. I tried to sort out the logical possibilities. Jesus had existed. Now, either Jesus was God or He wasn’t. If He was God, then Christianity is true. If He wasn’t God, there are two options: Either Jesus knew He wasn’t God but claimed divinity anyhow, or He deluded Himself into believing He was God. So about Jesus I saw only three possibilities: He was either God, or a liar, or a lunatic. Which was He? I didn’t yet know. The big empirical question was the disappearance of His body. If His body was still in the tomb, Christianity would never have started: People would have rejected any resurrection claims. I continued to research how Jesus’ body could have been removed from the tomb without being resurrected. I also continued to study the historical reliability of the scriptural texts themselves.

After months of research, reading books written by scholars from various points of view, much questioning of and debating with my Bible study leaders, talking with professors, and speaking to the rabbi who had bar-mitzvahed me, I came to a conclusion. Given the missing body, all of the post-resurrection eyewitness sightings, and all of the Old Testament prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, the resurrection was the only theory adequately explaining what happened. And insofar as I was able to apply the methods historians use to test the historicity of a document, I found the Bible to be not just reliable, but the most historically reliable document of antiquity. Unfortunately, despite my intellectual consent, I was still unable to believe in the resurrection. Something was still holding me back.

I finally came to the point where a decision had to be made. I’d spent my days thinking about and researching Christianity. I’d studied other religions such as Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but found that of all these religions (including atheism) only Christianity was making sense. A revealed truth must be understandable, and logical analysis is our only tool of evaluating reality. The eastern religions embrace irreconcilable contradictions and dualities, therefore they fail to be logically consistent. Islam holds Jesus didn’t die on the cross, which contradicts history; therefore I found Islam’s claim to truth untenable. Judaism didn’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, but the resurrection is the only logical explanation of the empty tomb, given the historical data. Throughout this process of evaluation, I knew I needed to make a decision. Deciding about Christianity isn’t one of those “put-off-until-tomorrow” things. The acceptance or rejection of Jesus Christ has eternal consequences. Intellectually, I conceded the fundamentals of Christianity: God loves us and desires a relationship with us; we sin and are separated from God; God loves us so much He became man in the form of Jesus Christ and He died for our sins. Internally, I knew it was all true, but I couldn’t put my faith in it yet. I was unable to give volitional assent to Christianity. What was continuing to hold me back?

I began to realize that the barriers were no longer intellectual, they were emotional. My scientific side was no longer repelled by Christianity — but my Jewish side was. My intellectual efforts had led me to acknowledge that Christianity was true — or, rather, that Christianity is the best explanation going. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe, truly. From my acculturation as a Jew arose a resistance to the name Jesus Christ. I recalled that Christian kids would harass me in elementary school because I was Jewish. I remembered also my father’s family’s response to Christianity through the years. It’s not un-Jewish, after all, to believe deeply in God. But what could be more un-Jewish than to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God? My emotional reaction was strongly negative. And if mine was such, what would be the reaction of my Jewish relatives and friends? How would they respond to my newfound faith in Christ?

I finally made my decision, and I did what Protestants call “accepting Christ.” I prayed to Jesus, thanking Him for dying for my sins and asking Him to come into my life so I could have a relationship with Him.

When I raised my head from my prayer, I looked around and realized that I’d accomplished yet another journey — here I was in Wittenberg.

My family and friends, when I told then of my conversion, didn’t seem to know exactly where I’d gone, or even who I was anymore. The disappointment they expressed and the distance at which some began to keep me were dispiriting. Had I joined a freakish cult? Had I committed some awful crime or grievous sin? No, I’d decided to follow Christ, renouncing sin, yet I was treated like some kind of criminal.

Despite these tribulations, I did notice a positive difference in my life, and through faith in what was written in the Bible I knew I could always count on Christ in any situation. Despite the difficulty with my family and friends’ rejection, even as a new believer I felt following Christ was the greatest and most rewarding thing I’d ever done. I became heavily involved in Campus Crusade, attending their weekly meetings as well as going on mission trips to share Jesus with other college students. I was making new Christian friends, and experiencing what it’s like to be part of Christ’s family. And yet, this new life entailed making more decisions. Different Christians believe different doctrines. Some believe one must undergo immersion baptism to attain salvation; others believe one must speak in tongues; others argue about whether salvation can be lost or not. Which doctrines should I believe? Now that I was following Christ, what type of Christian should I be?

There are over 28,000 different denominations out there. Should I become Lutheran, Baptist, Pentecostal, Eastern Orthodox? Should I remain a “nondenominational” and believe only what I myself patched together from the Bible? I decided to research the varieties of Christianity and began to talk ecclesiology with my Bible study leaders. Biff was a Catholic, and Jason, after much study, was in the process of converting to Catholicism also. Most of my other Christian friends were “Bible Christians” or “nondenominational,” having no real sense of doctrine.

I began to realize that although Campus Crusade is interdenominational and welcomes both Catholics and Protestants, its beliefs are definitely slanted toward Protestantism. Many of these views, like those of virtually all Protestants, go back to Martin Luther in 16th-century Wittenberg. Yet, having passed through Jerusalem and Shrewsbury already, I found myself wondering whether Wittenberg was my final destination. Christ, I knew, came to fulfill the Old Testament, and I knew from personal experience something of Judaism. The better I got to know Protestantism, the more it felt like an abolition than a fulfillment. Many Protestants, I found, believe that Baptism and Communion are merely symbolic. But did Christ just replace symbolic washings and rituals with new powerless symbolic traditions? I didn’t think so. As He said, He came to fulfill the law, not abolish it. Where in the throng of Christian churches had His intention been fulfilled?

I began to study the early Church, and found that the first time in recorded history when we see a list of New Testament books identical to today’s canon was in A.D. 367, in Bishop Athanasius’s Festal Letter. I looked back into the beliefs of the early Church before this time. To my surprise, I found a Church that looked much like today’s Catholic Church. Early Christians believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the intercession of the Saints, Purgatory, the blessedness of Mary, baptismal regeneration, the authority of Tradition, and held other pre-eminently Catholic beliefs. And yet other Christians had told me that all these were Catholic inventions, innovations added in the Middle Ages. But there were other striking similarities to today’s Catholicism. The liturgy was similar, with readings from various Scriptures and celebration of Communion. The Bishop of Rome (the Pope) oversaw the whole Church. As I went back in time to find the original Church, I found it was Roman Catholic.

My next area of study was ecclesiastical history. What was the developing Church like? It was just that, a developing Church. I began to see that every doctrinal belief held now by today’s Catholic Church could be traced back to the early Church before the biblical canon was set. And the beliefs developed over the centuries. One of the great examples of this doctrinal development is the Trinity, a doctrine to which most Protestants have no problem adhering: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate persons, yet co-equally God. Protestants must concede that the word “Trinity” isn’t found in Scripture, but they maintain that the idea is clear in Scripture. And yet there have long been, and continue to be, divergent interpretations of trinitarian doctrine (Modalism chief among them) by those who call themselves Christian. The fact of such disagreements, which entails the evident need for some authority to discern and pronounce on the correct understanding of the Trinity, is itself evidence that “Scripture alone” is not sufficient for correct doctrine. Similarly with Christology: When I studied the early Church I learned that there had been intelligent people claiming that Jesus was merely a man who appeared to be God, while others claimed He was God but only appeared to be a man. Other thinkers claimed that the Holy Spirit was merely an emanation from God and not God Himself. This illustrated that intellect alone is likewise insufficient to determine correct doctrine. As I studied Church history, I saw the blemishes, but I noticed that no matter how immoral a given Pope was, the doctrine remained pure. All of this confirmed, for me, Christ’s promise to the Catholic Church that the Holy Spirit would guide her to determine and maintain correct doctrine. Furthermore, even amidst corruption and scandal there was always a holy remnant in the Church, just as there had been in Old Testament Israel.

I saw many parallels between Catholicism and Old Testament Judaism. In Catholicism, in addition to approaching God directly we have priestly intercessors, as in Judaism. Both Catholicism and Judaism rely on oral tradition as well as written traditions. Both emphasize written prayers. Both have a hierarchical structure and are patriarchal. Each places a heavy emphasis on liturgy and a calendar of holy days.

I then began to study the Reformation. Why had the Reformers broken away from the Church? I began to read Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and others, and found that these Reformers’ main problems with the Catholic Church were not the problems of many modern-day Protestants. When I hear a Protestant criticize the Catholic Church, it usually has to do with “praying to saints,” the Real Presence in the Eucharist, or Mary. While those were minor issues for some of the Reformers, collectively their main issues were sola fide (salvation by nothing but faith) and sola scriptura (no authority but Scripture). The more I read the Reformers, the more I realized I disagreed with the alterations they had made to Christianity. I found that the Bible doesn’t support the claim that Protestantism’s revisions of historic Christianity are “Bible-based.” Curiously, the only time that the phrase sola fide (by faith alone) is used in the Bible is in James 2:24: “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (italics added). Also the idea of sola scriptura (Scripture alone) is not only absent from Scripture, but is also contradictory to the message of Scripture, as witness 2 Thessalonians 2:15: “So then brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us either by word of mouth or by letter.”

It also became clear that, ironically enough, the Reformers were, in many ways, more like the Catholics of today than they are like the Protestants of today who claim the Reformers as their forebears. For example, Martin Luther was an avid Marianist and a believer in the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Conversely, in some areas the Reformers allowed themselves radical freedoms that most modern-day Protestants would surely reject. For instance, today’s Protestants (like today’s Catholics) don’t believe that books can be taken out of the Bible. Yet Zwingli threw out the Book of Revelation, and Luther tried to remove not only Revelation but also Hebrews, James, and Jude, in addition to the Deutero-canon. I also began to read Catholic apologists such as Peter Kreeft, Karl Keating, and Robert Sungenis, who showed me the continuity of belief from the early Church to today’s Catholic Church, as well as the extreme discontinuity of the fractured movement known as Protestantism.

Thus I came to the conclusion that Catholicism is more biblical than “Bible Christianity.” This was a shock to many of my friends at Campus Crusade. A few people I called brothers began to think I was “demon-led.” Yet most of my friends didn’t react with such anti-Catholic feelings. They believed I’d gone astray, or had been misled, and they simply wanted to love me and help me love Christ. Many of these concerned brethren, however, are now exploring the Catholic Church for themselves.

In preparation for my Baptism, Confirmation, and First Communion, I got to know the Catholic Church more deeply, in a new way, not from books but from participation. I began to notice how the Mass, like Jewish services, is imbued with Scripture. The art, liturgy, music, architecture, and readings all come from Scripture. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is quite unlike those sermon-centered Protestant services that focus on one small text of the pastor’s choosing. I grew to love the Catholic sacramentalism and to understand it better. I began to see how the Mass is the fulfillment of the Jewish Passover, which God said in Exodus should be done forever. The first Passover was in celebration of the Lord saving His people from Egypt and guiding them toward the Promised Land of Israel. The new, fulfilled Passover ceremony, the Mass, is a celebration of the Lord saving us, His people, from sin and opening to us the Promised Land of Heaven. The true Passover Lamb has been slain, and like the Israelites, we must eat the Lamb’s flesh, as the Lamb Himself commanded.

Thus, after much study and prayer I finally came home to Rome. I had begun my journey with numerous religions before me. Narrowing it down through logic and reason, I found Christianity to be the one true religion. Then I entered the splintered world of Christianity, where I found the Catholic Church to be the Church Jesus Christ founded on St. Peter, the keeper of the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. I thank God that I may now partake of the sacraments instituted by His Son. I cannot adequately describe the experience of receiving Christ for the first time in the Eucharist: This was the beginning of a new intimacy with Christ my Lord.

So my journey at last has reached its goal. And yet I find that my traveling is not done, for I’ve become sort of a travel guide, and I spend a good deal of time going back to visit those who are, spiritually speaking, still dwelling in the places I’ve passed through — Wittenberg, Shrewsbury, Jerusalem. I try to help them see that Rome is the true destination, the only one worth traveling to. Dedicating my life to Christ has led to radical changes in my intellectual plans as well: I’m now pursuing a double major in religion and ancient Greek, and I plan to do graduate studies in theology.

I take to heart the words of Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio: “It is not enough to discover Christ — you must bring Him to others! The world today is one great mission land, even in countries of longstanding Christian tradition.” And I hope that this story will encourage my Catholic brethren to heed what the first pope, Peter, urged in his letter two thousand years ago: “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15).

Catholicism is a supernatural gift but also demonstrably a rational and logical faith, founded firmly in historical fact. To those who are searching for truth, to all on journeys of their own, I can report with assurance that God is faithful and will, if you let Him, lead you to the truth you seek. I’m confident that you can discover, as I have, that Christianity is the one true religion and the Catholic Church is the one true Church.