From Wheaton to Rome: Why Evangelicals become Roman Catholic

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2002 by McKnight, Scot

As another important example of the crisis of certainty, I take Kristine Franklin.49 Before her conversion to the RCC, while en route to the missionary field, she said, "I didn't feel even a twinge of regret over what we had left behind in the States.... I knew we were being obedient ... [because] We were living smack in the middle of God's will, and it gave us a great feeling of security. We had given ourselves fully to bringing Christ's light .... etc."5o She encountered theological problems with sola scriptura that created doubts. She says, "Worse yet, I didn't see how claiming to go by the Bible alone could provide certitude of belief for believers."51 About the "choose-your-own-church syndrome" she says, "there was no way for any of us to know for sure which of us had it right."52 And about preaching the gospel to the illiterate (another troubling problem for her view of the Christian life), she comments, ". . . as a missionary taking the gospel to illiterate people, I realized I had to be absolutely sure, before God, that what I was telling them was, in fact, the Christian Faith, free from error. It had to be one hundred percent Truth. The problem was, using my `Bible alone' principle, I had no way to be absolutely sure."53 Into this "cacophony of conflicting teachings" she stepped and hollered out, "how was a person to know who was right?"54 She concluded that [t]heology for the modern Evangelical is a matter of his own opinion about what Scripture means" and among them "there is no way to know who has the whole truth" and such was "completely unattainable."55 She, with her husband evidently in tow, converted to the RCC, and there "we have the fullness of the Christian Faith-- not seventy-five percent of the Truth, not ninety percent, but all of it, one hundred percent."56

If Kristine Franklin expresses her need for certainty, she ranks second to Bob Sungenis, who went from controversy to controversy, and therefore from one church to another. He says of himself, "Presbyterians are known in Protestant circles as the `split P's' because of all the factions created over their divergent interpretations of the Bible. When I joined the fray, things didn't get any better. We were in and out of five different Presbyterian churches within the next five years, each move being due to disagreements on the pastor's interpretation of the Bible."57 After questing for a resolution to this crisis of transcendence and finding it, ultimately, in the RCC, he says, "I found an indisputable example of the infallibility of the Catholic Church when I began to reflect on the question of the canon of Scripture."58 He declares, "The issue of the canon is an unsolvable epistemological problem for Protestants. For if one cannot be certain which books belong in the Bible, how can one presume to use it 'alone' as a reliable guide to saving faith in God?"59 Of Protestants, then, he says, "Many prefer uncertainty than to acknowledge that the Catholic Church is Christ's Church."60 His confession: "As a Catholic, I am now at peace, away from the roiling controversies of Protestantism, secure in the consolation of the truth" and "I rejoice in God's free gift of grace that opened my eyes to see the truth that had always been plainly evident, though I had missed it all those years."61