by Patrick Kingston
For the past few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about the faith. It’s been a journey through the entire realm of Christianity and has lately landed on the question of converting to Orthodoxy. It all began by looking at the origins of my faith. I went to an Adventist preschool, a Methodist church in elementary school, and a Southern Baptist one since middle school. All my life I have been involved in Christianity in some way, but being raised in the church bred a particular kind of indifference and sometimes even resentment towards it. When I was little and had questions about things like evolution and the Big Bang and space and many scientific theories that seemed to contradict the dogma of the church I went to, I received simple answers that were both philosophically and scientifically inadequate. My salvation experience was a summer camp conversion where the fervor of the room led me to come to the front to say a short prayer with someone. When I was older I looked back on the experience and felt manipulated. I was 8. I didn’t know what I was doing and was manipulated by the exact same light and sounds you find at a secular concert.
At some point along the way it seemed as though I had just stopped believing full stop. But, I still had family commitments so I still had to go to church. If something is all you’ve ever known, it’s easy to just go through the motions. I’m reminded of the parable of the barren fig tree (Luke 13:6-9). God came to me when I was born, when I was being taught, and when I was becoming an adult and all the while, I bore no fruit. In God’s vineyard of souls, I was the fig tree to be struck down. But, just as Moses advocated for Israel when God wished to burn the nation to the ground, Jesus advocated for me and saved me.
I spent many years simply acting Christian, just existing in the vineyard. But, in my Sophomore year of highschool I began to reinvestigate Christianity. I decided that I had to look at the origins of the faith. All throughout my life I had been Protestant, but knowing history I knew that there were things before any Protestant denomination. I had to go all the way back to the beginning. I began before even Sola Scriptura – the founding principle that I had been force fed my entire life. I started off with two simple questions: Can I trust the bible at all? As well as: What even is the Bible? After all, if I am to believe that scripture alone is what I need, I ought to know that I can trust it in the first place. Growing up largely southern Baptist gave me an intense reverence for the Bible, an intense dislike of “man made traditions,” a complete lack of understanding of the doctrines of other Christian traditions, and an intense lack of understanding of what the Bible was and where it came from.
And so I learned about manuscript studies, historical manuscript families, the Greek language, dating techniques, copying techniques, and much much more. Beyond just the manuscripts for the texts we do have, I also learned about the texts that we didn’t have. Some of these texts are held up by conspiracy theorists as books that were “hidden” from us, these are the books that are simply heretical or dismissed as anachronistic and pseudepigraphal. Others are texts that are simply never heard of because they have been lost to time. Others had simply stopped being read by Christians for one reason or another. I was absolutely enchanted by this world of Biblical studies that I had no clue existed before.
After all, the most I had ever heard about the writing of the Bible was that “Moses wrote some, some old testament people wrote some, the apostles wrote some other stuff, it was translated and now we have the Bible.” This answer always made me deeply unsatisfied, and it was simple explanations like this that my inquisitive younger self always received that made me lose my faith at the slightest resistance. Now that I had found an answer that took into account human authorship, church history, patristic texts, heretical texts, divine authorship, and more that I finally felt as though I could put my doubts in scripture to bed. Once I knew that I could trust the text, I was absolutely hooked. I was so swept up in this flurry of new information that my zeal for Biblical studies seemed to at times overshadow my zeal for Christ.
Now if I had been studying the text of the Bible, this wouldn’t have been a problem because it so obviously points towards Jesus. The problem was that I wasn’t doing that, I was studying the history and compilation apparatus surrounding the text. This phase of my journey did give me some answers to the questions that I had earlier. Can I trust the Bible at all? Yes. What even is the Bible? It’s complicated, but long story short it’s a collection of inspired texts compiled over thousands of years.
This whirlwind of study left me with more questions than answers. For one, I was no longer convinced of Sola Scriptura. Consider two pieces of text. One says “I am inspired by God and I was written by someone who traces their authority back to Jesus.” The other text says, “I am inspired by God and I was written by someone who traces their authority back to Jesus.” They teach similar doctrines, but one has certain things like the flesh being evil and that Jesus didn’t have a physical body. Now imagine dozens of these texts existing. The question then arises: How do we know which texts are actually inspired and which are not?
A cliff notes version of the current understanding of the New Testament is that there were many texts in circulation in the regions that Christianity had spread. By about the second century, the texts that we regard as canonical were all in circulation. However, there were several texts that were also circulated along with them. These are texts like the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas, texts that we still have around today. They were so influential that many of the earliest fathers and earliest codices held them to be inspired and of equal authority to the New Testament. Ultimately, the Bishops at the time who lived at the time gathered together at church councils and at the council of Carthage in 397, using the consensus of how these were used in the church they set in stone what we know now as our New testament canon. These texts, while they were eventually recognized to be not divinely inspired, still taught good teachings that could be of some beneficial spiritual use.
Eventually, I began to look into the Bishops who were in the Church councils (and those before them) as well as their writings. This experience became very individualistic for me, as I found myself accepting new doctrines like the role that pre-written and rote prayer could play in my life, the real presence in the Eucharist, and many more doctrines that sacramental churches hold that I had been taught to scorn. On the outside, my day to day life was still very Southern Baptist. I was still going to this church every single Sunday. I was still going to youth group every single Wednesday. I was even playing bass guitar on Wednesday nights, and sometimes even on Sunday mornings for the whole congregation. However, while the Christian walk includes and necessitates a communal relation to others, I internally found myself at odds with my church community concerning doctrines that I held to be so essential. I felt that I was no longer genuinely in the community. This was ultimately a conversion of the head, but not of the heart. I was still the unfruitful fig tree, the lost coin, the prodigal son. I had to continue thinking about the origins of my faith.
I reached a point where I settled the question of scripture, and of where it came from, and continued reading through the writings of the Church Fathers. I discovered that while these people aren’t infallible and can have ideas that are down right heretical, they also held at times the ability to have mind blowing and fruitful interpretations of parables. My favorite example of this is the parable of the barren fig tree, and I’ve already snuck a personalized version of this into the second paragraph. Theophilus of Antioch used the language, “Vineyard of God.” Ephrem the Syrian and Cyril of Alexandria liken the vinedresser to Moses advocating and also to Jesus as the greater Moses. Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan, and basically every aforementioned writer all compare the three years the owner came to different periods in the Old Testament and the nation of Israel.
Through reading the Fathers, I was reminded that I wasn’t the first Christian to ever live, nor were the older Christians I lived with. Also, the pastor I had heard from for years was not the only source of spiritual and theological wisdom. I had always been taught that if I had a question, I should just read the Bible and find the answer to it. I was told to only rely on myself and my interpretations of scripture. The Fathers taught me that many of these questions had already been thought through. It was amazing to see that I could look back far into history and see what the earliest post-scripture Christians believed. Theology didn’t begin with me and my tradition. It is an ongoing conversation that stretches all the way back to Jesus.
Even beyond this, in an act of spiritual immaturity, I even began to be skeptical of the modern Christians around me and only trusting the most ancient sources I could find. My thinking at the time was that I ought to trust only the most ancient sources. After all, the further away that you get from the source of something, the more likely it is to be perverted. Nobody today can have theological wisdom, right? How foolish.
Looking back, it was reading the Church fathers that softened my heart again and let me rediscover the beauty of the Parables and Scripture and such that I felt my heart to be with Jesus again. I felt that I was finally bearing fruit, albeit at a slow pace. In every period of my study, for example, the looming question of Orthodoxy was never, and hasn’t yet, been resolved for me. While I stand still at this crossroads discerning if I ought to be heading east, I feel the pressure that I should still be moving forward in my faith. Recently, I have begun praying daily, and studying scripture when I can, although it can be inconsistent. It has been months since I’ve gone to a formal Sunday morning church service. Instead of praying and getting closer to God, I sometimes spend time in petty theological debates. Instead of going to church on Sundays, the thought that I am excused from doing anything because I’m uncomfortable seeps in even though the fact that I get to sleep in is equally as big a reason. While I am in this situation of choosing where I ought to be Christian, I still need to be one.
In some ways, instead of this long winding intellectual journey, I wish that I had simply looked to the true origins of my faith. I wish that I had the simple faith of the ones who gave me the faith in the first place. I’m not talking about some obscure Saint Ioanisiasnisiss of Paraclenopolis in the Xth century. I’m talking about my Mom. The one who truly gave me the faith. I wish that I didn’t have these questions arise and simply strove to be holy in my day to day life. I wish that I didn’t let myself rationalize excuses to not go to church. I wish that I had a simpler, more pious faith of the Christian who came before me. For better or for worse, my Mom isn’t bothered by these questions. When there is church, she goes. When there is Bible study, she goes. When it is time to worship, she does. She moves forward.
I now stand still at my own crossroads. I pray that I, a prodigal son, will have obstacles removed and be able to fully come back home. Further, I pray for discernment to know where my home is on this earth. But, most of all, I pray for the strength to get out of my head and live out the simple faith that I was born with. Amen.