How did I get here?

About a year ago I started to feel really confused on my religious beliefs.  As a married father of three, and having grown up in a fundamentalist baptist and evangelical church, I thought I knew exactly what I believed about God, Salvation, and the after life.  My wife, however, began becoming very interested in social justice, and a lot of what we read together in the Bible flew in the face of the prosperity gospel that I had grown up in. It also seemed to fly in the face of much of what I would consider the American Dream.  These new questions about Scripture began to lead me down a road of real doubt about the church and the Bible.  I went through phase at the age of 29 that most people probably go through during their college years.  For the first time in my life I felt like I had no idea what Christianity really was.

Growing up I had learned and subscribed to the great Protestant tenants for Salvation.  Sola Fide (Faith Alone) and Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone).  These tenants are core to any Protestant Belief and sparked the Reformation. Martin Luther believed that all it took was Faith Alone in Christ to be saved. He also believed that all people could interpret the Bible, and that the Bible was the only central authority (The Pope was not needed). I believed these tenants strongly until I started really diving into my Bible and trying to figure it out for myself.  I started finding that some of what I read, I did not interpret like I was taught.  I also sought answers from others but in the end it seemed like everyone had a different view of some of the big issues.  This was troubling to me.  Was the Bible really infallible and complete?  This was a question that I asked one pastor and he assured me that the early church councils that assembled the Bible as we know it went through a painstaking process to compile it and they were very prayerful about it.  He was certain that the group at the Synod of Hyppo in 393 compiled the Bible accurately.  It certainly seemed reasonable.  I wondered what church today is closest to that church, or the church that existed in the first century.  The simple answer was the Catholic Church, but that could not be it; could it? It had to be a protestant church, I thought.

My journey continued and my questions grew.  I actually had so many unanswered questions on my list that I briefly began a blog basically calling out the truth.  The blog was really a low point in my faith, where I had so many questions, and so few answers, that I was pretty sure my entire religious upbringing was a farce. Fortunately this was a brief point in time, but it allowed me to really flush out my questions and start rebuilding my faith on the right answers.

The goal of this blog is to help me process through my new emerging faith and religious beliefs.  As I start this blog I am sort of in a world in between protestantism and catholicism.  I am attending a Protestant church and also going to Catholic Mass. I spend a lot of my free time reading about Catholicism and learning about it.   If this blog can help me and others formulate their faith, in a real way, like Christ wants us to live for him, then I believe that is a good thing.  I hope you enjoy taking this journey with me.