Becoming un-Baptist 6: When Protestant Theology Crumbles Or, How Gerry Breshears Helped Me Become an Orthodox Christian

Becoming un-Baptist 6: When Protestant Theology Crumbles

Or, How Gerry Breshears Helped Me Become an Orthodox Christian

In my previous series of posts entitled “Becoming un-Baptist,”[1] I recounted how I went from being a confessional Baptist to no longer even being baptistic in my theology.  The crumbling of my Baptist theology was not the end of my reconsideration and shifting of my theological views.  Indeed, it was part of a larger shift in my theological paradigm.

I consider myself to have been privileged to have studied at Western Seminary.  One of the professors there who helped me become a better thinker was Gerry Breshears.^[2]  Sometimes this came through my own disagreement with some of his positions.  However, this came primarily through his practice of Sola Scriptura (even though he would likely be displeased by my use of a Latin phrase instead of the English “Scripture Alone”).  Gerry constantly and helpfully pressed me and others to support our beliefs and opinions directly from Scripture. 

I still remember one comment he made on a doctrinal statement I submitted.  Gerry’s
brief comment was, “Do you have a Bible verse for this?”  The fact was, that I did not have a Bible verse.  I had reached a point where I could not find a passage of Scripture that would clearly support limited atonement.  While I know it is very dangerous to speculate about another’s feelings and thoughts, I strongly suspect that Gerry took no small satisfaction in compelling his students to completely reevaluate their theological positions in light of the biblical texts.  He set me upon a trajectory of critically examining every doctrine I had held in light of Scripture.  Ideally, I suppose that I should have figured this all out during my 5½ years that I was a student at Western Seminary.  This was decidedly not the case. 

I found that reading the Bible continued to crumble my doctrinal views.  At the same time as this process was ongoing, I entered into a journey of studying the Church Fathers.  This resulted in even further problems for my doctrinal positions.  The Fathers were quoting verses and interpreting them in ways that were often utterly foreign to my doctrines.  This led me to reread the Bible and find that those verses which I had overlooked (or interpreted around) suddenly came to bear upon my understanding of doctrine. 

I went through a theological crisis.  As one doctrine crumbled after another, I found that I was less certain of more and more things which led me to question ever further and find even yet more questions.  This was a ridiculous time in my life.  I found that simply reading the Bible became difficult because I was constantly beset with the problem of a shifting paradigm.  Passages which once made sense, suddenly did not; and passages which were once overlooked gave answers which were not compatible with what I had believed.

Being beset with questions, I decided to find answers.  The answers I found were significantly unsettling.  It was my journey to find answers that led to the collapse of my Protestant theology.  At first my questions and answers in no way threatened my Protestant beliefs.  I should note that none of my questions arose from any sort of perniciousness.  These were sincere questions as I was attempting to discern the Truth which I should believe.

The first issue that I had was imputed righteousness.  I could find no textual support for this understanding of righteousness.  The answer I was given was that if righteousness is not imputed, than it must be imparted, and that view is clearly wrong.  Meanwhile I was thinking that perhaps both were wrong.

There were several other fairly significant theological questions that I had.  However, the most important came when I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the New Testament in the Greek, and I realized that I could not support Sola Scriptura from Scripture alone.  This was troubling, and doubly so, because I realized I could make a better argument for tradition from the New Testament (especially when I was reading the Greek) than I had previously thought possible.  In fact, by following Scripture, I ended up realizing that Paul taught that He had handed down an unwritten tradition.  This can be seen in:

2^nd Thessalonians 2:15 “So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.”

and

1^st Corinthians 11:2 “Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you.”

I looked at these and other verses and I realized that the Bible taught that that unwritten traditions handed down from the Apostles were to be kept. This then was the moment when it all imploded.  The very exegetical method I had been taught led me to a point where it killed itself and thrust me into the arms of Tradition.  I found myself pondering the probability that there was an Apostolic Tradition beyond the books of the New Testament and I began reading the writings from the Early Christians with an eye towards discerning what these unwritten Apostolis Traditions were.

This was all happening while I was almost Anglican.  However, as I was entering into the Apostolic Tradition, Anglicanism seemed less and less like a valid option, I was left with two real choices: Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. 

---

[1] Ecclesiology, Theology of Baptism,  and Practice of Baptism

[2] There were several others, but this post is about the formative effect that Gerry’s methodology had upon my own way of thinking about theology.