A. David Anders, PhD
Protestant Historian
I grew up an Evangelical Protestant in Birmingham, Alabama. My parents were loving and devoted, sincere in their faith, and deeply involved in our church. They instilled in me a respect for the Bible as the Word of God, and a desire for a living faith in Christ. Missionaries frequented our home and brought their enthusiasm for their work. Bookshelves in our house were filled with theology and apologetics. From an early age, I absorbed the notion that the highest possible calling was to teach the Christian faith. I suppose it is no surprise that I became a Church historian, but becoming a Catholic was the last thing I expected.
My family’s church was nominally Presbyterian, but denominational differences meant very little to us. I frequently heard that disagreements over Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, or church government were unimportant as long as one believed the Gospel. By this, we meant that one should be “born again,” that salvation is by faith alone, and that the Bible is the sole authority for Christian faith. Our church supported the ministries of many different Protestant denominations, but the one group we certainly opposed was the Catholic Church.
The myth of a Protestant “recovery” of the Gospel was strong in our church. I learned very early to idolize the Protestant Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin, because they supposedly had rescued Christianity from the darkness of medieval Catholicism. Catholics were those who trusted in “good works” to get them to heaven, who yielded to tradition instead of Scripture, and who worshipped Mary and the saints instead of God. Their obsession with the sacraments also created an enormous impediment to true faith and a personal relationship with Jesus. There was no doubt. Catholics were not real Christians.
Our church was characterized by a kind of confident intellectualism. Presbyterians tend to be quite theologically minded, and seminary professors, apologists, scientists, and philosophers were frequent speakers at our conferences. It was this intellectual atmosphere that had attracted my father to the church, and his bookshelves were lined with the works of the Reformer John Calvin, and the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, as well as more recent authors like B. B. Warfield, A. A. Hodge, C. S. Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer. As a part of this academic culture, we took it for granted that honest inquiry would lead anyone to our version of Christian faith.
All of these influences left definite impressions on me as a child. I came to see Christianity as somewhat akin to Newtonian physics. The Christian faith consisted in certain eminently reasonable and immutable laws, and you were guaranteed eternal life provided you constructed your life according to these principles. I also thought this was the message clearly spelled out in the official textbook of Christian theology: the Bible. Only mindless trust in human tradition or depraved indifference could possibly explain anyone’s failure to grasp these simple truths.
There was one strange irony in this highly religious and theological atmosphere. We stressed that it was faith and not works that saves. We also confessed the classic Protestant belief that all people are “totally depraved,” meaning that even their best moral efforts are intrinsically hateful to God and can merit nothing. By the time I reached high school, I put these pieces together and concluded that religious practice and moral striving were more or less irrelevant to my life. It was not that I lost my faith. On the contrary, I absorbed it thoroughly. I had accepted Christ as my Savior and been “born again.” I believed that the Bible was the Word of God. I also believed none of my religious or moral works had any value. So I quit practicing them.
