17

With a stack of new time sheets piled on my lap, I logged in to my blog. I wasn’t eager to do battle with the old computer again, so a little procrastination was in order.

The Christians had responded to my post where I pointed out that their religion had logical flaws. Part of me thought I might get a series of short comments saying, “You’re right. Anyone know where the nearest Buddhist temple is?” But they weren’t going down that easily.

“America is fundamentally a Protestant nation,” the commenter Steve G. said. “The idea of just picking up the Bible and being able to discover God and Christ is deeply ingrained in this culture to the point that the average American with no foreknowledge of Christian history (yourself, for example) would think this is the norm.”

He explained that there’s another theory: Before Jesus left the earth, he founded a Church and instilled it with his own authority. The Church is still around today, the theory went, recognizable by the fact that its leadership can be traced back in an unbroken line, all the way to Christ himself. God still guides its doctrines to articulate the truth for all times and places. It was this God-guided Church that chose the books of the Bible. It is through this Church that illiterate people and those with poor reading comprehension skills can come to know what is true about God. The thousands of Christians who lived in the three hundred years before the New Testament coalesced were part of this Church, and through it they practiced their faith before the Bible as we know it existed. To this day, the majority of Christians throughout the world belong to this Church.

I set the stack of time sheets next to the desk and leaned forward. Was he saying what I thought he was saying? Footsteps shushed past the office door, and I almost broke the keyboard trying to get another page on the screen. Our employees had already seen me staring at crazy Jesus websites; the last thing I needed was for them to see me staring at my own crazy Jesus website. Nobody came in, so I pulled the blog back up and kept reading.

Steve went on to say that the question of who has the final authority on matters of doctrine is the fundamental issue in Christianity. He went so far as to suggest that I would not have clarity on anything in this religion if I didn’t first tackle this issue. “As a Catholic, I am obviously going to be biased towards one view, but. . .”

He’s Catholic! I thought back through all the discussions in blog comments and emails, remembered terminology from passing remarks, and realized with a start: They’re all Catholic. These readers whom I had hand-picked to comment on my blog based on their ability to defend their beliefs against atheistic arguments . . . every one of them was Catholic.

Joe poked his head in to ask a question, and at the sound of his voice I banged on the keyboard to close browser windows again. “It’s just me,” he assured me. “You surfing Jesus sites again?”

“No. I was looking at porn. I swear!” We both laughed, which was a relief. Things had been tense ever since this house situation had come up, and it was good to have something to talk about that was only minimally controversial. I motioned him over. “Come look at this.”

Joe put his hand on my shoulder and leaned toward the screen. He whispered words intermittently as he read. The Bible nowhere claims for itself that it is authoritative . . . also the issue of canon, which books to include . . . if the Bible doesn’t provide an infallible index, we can’t know what’s inspired . . .

Joe stood up. “He’s a Catholic, isn’t he?”

“Yes! Isn’t that nuts? They all are!”

“You need to stop messing around with these people. Catholics believe weird stuff.”

“Well, yeah. If I’d known they were Catholic, I wouldn’t have invited them to read.”

Here is where I would have expected Joe to change the subject back to whatever business matter he’d come to talk about, but he didn’t. “Have these people never studied history? Do they not know about the pagan influences, the abuses? The Reformation happened for a reason, guys.”

“Right, right,” I nodded vigorously, basking in the unity that this subject created.

Joe kept staring at the screen. “This stuff about the Church’s authority would be like saying that the Supreme Court is a higher authority than the Constitution. They want to elevate humans over written rules? C’mon.”

“Right!”

As he glared at the words on the screen, he whispered, Jesus chose twelve disciples, gave them authority . . . promised the Holy Spirit would protect them . . . they had successors, more successors. . . same line of successors today. “That’s crazy. If even one evil person had gotten into the mix—which undoubtedly happened—then that screws up the whole thing. That’s why you have to have written rules to come back to.”

“Right!”

“How do you write a new blog post?”

“Ri—what?”

He yanked a chair away from the desk behind us and sat down. He slid the keyboard in front of himself and stretched his hands as if getting ready to type for a very long time. “Don’t worry, I’ll say it’s you writing the post,” he assured me.

Joe? Writing words that would be attributed to me? I almost threw myself across the keyboard. “Oh, you know, I was going to shut this thing down. I mean, why waste our time with these people?”

“Cool, you’re already logged in. Is it just this New Post button here?”

“Oh, gosh. Don’t say anything crazy.”

“What are you talking about?”

I didn’t even need to respond. If Joe thought someone’s idea was stupid and wrong, he would express his opinion by saying, “That idea is stupid and wrong.” His German heritage instilled him with a love of efficiency, and he would view any embellishments to the statement as a waste of time. If I, on the other hand, thought someone’s idea was stupid and wrong, I’d start with some hand-wringing preamble about their positive qualities, drop a couple of hints that I might have a slight problem with one aspect of what they said—just a small thing, really—and end up blaming myself and telling them to have a nice day.

“I’m writing as you,” Joe said. “I’m not going to go all ‘Joe’ on them. I’ll be easygoing. See?” He pointed to an opening sentence he’d already written: Catholicism is a corrupt belief system that is not true Christianity.

I grabbed the keyboard. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re trying to say, and I’ll translate it.”

“Okay. I’m wondering why otherwise intelligent people would blindly follow popes and bishops, when they know that plenty of them have been shameful sinners.”

I typed: If you don’t mind, my husband just had a quick question about some of the issues we discussed about authority. There’s just one thing about the issue of Church leaders having authority, given that maybe they’re not totally perfect 100% of the time. . .

We went on like that until we had a post that Joe approved of as truthful enough and I approved of as polite enough, and I published it. Joe told me to let him know if anyone responded. When he left the room to go back to his office, I noticed that he’d forgotten to bring up whatever business matter he’d originally come in to talk about.

* * *

“Joe, the internet’s talking to you,” I called when I saw him walk by on his way to the break room.

He turned instantly and came into the office. “Has that Steve guy responded?”

“Yeah. Right here.”

With his eyes fixed on the screen, Joe nudged me to let him sit in the chair. I stood and read over his shoulder.

“The fundamental question is: Can God convey truth through imperfect people?” Steve said. “Rejecting the Church doesn’t get you out of that quandary. Christianity has always been composed of imperfect people, all the way back to the authors of the Bible.”

Steve went on to say that the Constitution analogy actually supports the theory of there being a Church acting as a sort of divinely guided Supreme Court. “Imagine if, instead of setting up the Supreme Court, America’s founding fathers had distributed the Constitution to individual citizens and said, ‘Make of this what you will.’ ” He drew out the obvious answer: There would be chaos. There’d be bickering over meaning, different groups banding together to advocate for their particular interpretations, and endlessly splintering factions. “It would seem strange indeed that the founding fathers would be wise enough to set up a system for handling the interpretation of the Constitution, but that God Almighty wouldn’t be equally wise and do the same basic thing.”

“I’d rather have chaos than be bossed around by a bunch of guys in the Vatican.” I nudged Joe on the shoulder, waiting for his gesticulations of fervent agreement, but he was still.

“Well, they would say the Church’s teachings are from God, not the leaders of the Church themselves.”

“People believe that? What century are we in?”

Joe scrolled up and down the page, occasionally highlighting passages and re-reading them. “Yeah, it’s kind of crazy . . . although it’s the same theory about the writers of the Bible. What he’s saying is, ‘Can you believe that God can convey perfect truth through imperfect people, or not?’ ”

It was only then that it dawned on me. “Are you agreeing with him?”

“No. Well, maybe this point has some validity, but there are plenty of other issues.”

“Wait. How do you suddenly know so much about Catholicism?”

“I had Catholic friends when I was growing up. That and I just spent like four hours researching it.”

“That’s all you’ve been doing since we wrote the post?”

Joe didn’t answer. He was reading. I tried not to calculate how much money that just cost us in lost billable hours.

“American Christianity is a mess,” Joe continued. “I just saw that there are over thirty thousand different Protestant denominations now, and they disagree about the most basic stuff. Like, some say infant baptism is critical, and others say it’s unnecessary and invalid. Those are mutually exclusive claims, yet everyone thinks they’re right. I have to say, there are some glaring problems with authority there.”

“Wow. I didn’t see that coming.”

“You don’t think this is compelling at all?”

It wasn’t that, exactly. If Steve had been talking about a Christian sect I’d never heard of, I would have been intrigued. But the Catholic Church? I didn’t dislike the Church’s members—my maternal grandparents were Catholic, and though I didn’t know them well before they died, they left me with a positive impression of Catholics as people—but the Catholic Church as an establishment was a different story. When I heard the words Catholic Church, images of an archaic, corrupt institution came to mind. It struck me as organized religion at its worst, a church run by power-hungry men who concocted absurd doctrines to secure their own power and fill their coffers. So while Steve’s theory might make sense in a vacuum, I didn’t know how to reconcile that with the fact that he was talking about Catholicism.

Before I could explain any of that to Joe, a paralegal came in to say that he was needed in a conference room. Joe stood and offered the chair back to me. After he left, he ducked his head back in the door and said, “Would you send me that guy’s email address? I have some questions for him.”