Transcription
I've been on a journey over the last nine months diving deep into early church history, trying to find the original way that Christians have always worshiped Jesus. It has taken me down these paths that I simply did not expect. And now I'm in a place where I simply cannot remain a Protestant. I know it's really crazy, but I'm going to explain to you my reasons why in the most loving way, but also in an educated way in what I have discovered with not only history, but also with what scripture says and what Christians have done since 33 AD. So, let's get into it.
[music] Welcome back to Lighten Up. Hi guys, [music] my name is Hannah Cruz. I am the host of the Lighten Up podcast. We have been talking a lot about what is up with this Catholic thing in this brand new series right here on the Lighten Up podcast. A lot of you have been watching this series and so if you've already been watching, I highly encourage you to just subscribe to this channel. You're already watching, might as well subscribe. the easiest way to support this podcast. Whether you're watching right here on YouTube, on Apple Podcast, or on Spotify, we welcome you to be a part of the fam. So, click that subscribe button, like this video, share this video with a friend.
But yeah, let me explain this. I grew up in a non-denominational home, loved it. Went to Christian school, learned all kinds of scripture, did like Awanas and was an FCA and all the Christian clubs at school and part of the youth group. I mean, I really adore the foundation that I was given with my Christian faith, with what my parents taught me, with what my teachers taught me. I don't have any regrets with how I grew up and in the uh Protestant circles that I did grow up in. If anything, it gave me a love for Jesus and a love for scripture that is so deeply rooted within me that it's brought me to this place in my life where I had such a desire to want to know how the earliest Christians did things.
I went on this journey starting nine months ago where I started asking questions that I didn't think that I would ever ask. Questions like uh when was the Bible assembled by the Holy Spirit and who assembled all of the books of the Bible? How did the earliest Christians worship? What did they believe? What was the doctrine like? What about the American church is different than maybe the early church? And so it did take me down this road of studying history and studying scripture in a way that I had never understood. And what I realized is there was something lacking in the foundation of Christianity that I had already established. There was one thing that I was missing. And that was mainly the fact that I didn't know my own church history. I didn't know anything about what the earliest Christians did outside of just what scripture said. So, in order to really find the roots of that, I had to study history. I had to read the early church fathers, which absolutely blew my mind and also freaked me out because I realized the early church doesn't really look like the American church. And it doesn't look like the non-denominational services that I've been to. In fact, all of the early church and what they're talking about and how they worshiped and how they did things, it actually looks kind of Catholic, Orthodox, whatever. And it it started to really freak me out because I was like, "That can't be right. It just can't be right."
So, it has been months and months of wrestling with this, waking up at 5:00 in the morning and reading through early church history, reading through documents that I have never been exposed to before as a southern Texas little, you know, non- denominational girl. And with everything that I've discovered and everything I've learned, I've come to a place where I'm like, I know too much now. I know too much that now because of what I know, I cannot go back to what I didn't know. So today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to explain to you a few reasons why I can't remain a Protestant. And now my definition of Protestant is just anybody that's not Catholic or Orthodox. That's just my definition of it. Okay? So don't be saying, "Oh my gosh, non-denominational is not Protestant." Well, in my mind, it actually is. Anybody that's not Catholic or Orthodox in my mind is protesting the Catholic Church. And on top of looking into the history behind everything, I started devouring all of the debates, all the Protestant versus Catholic debates, all the Orthodox versus the American Christian way of thinking. And I started getting so overwhelmed realizing I simply did not know all of this about the history of my Christian roots. Let me go back. Let me go back to the original. Let me go back to what the earliest Christians did, how they worshiped, how they believed. That's ultimately what I want. I want the oldest, most ancient form of the truth. And it led me down this path to where now I'm like, I can't reconcile remaining a Protestant with all the stuff that I have discovered in this treasure trove of not only historical information, but biblical information that ties it together so beautifully. And this is nothing against my Protestant friends and family and all of you that I love so very much. This is just a video for anybody who's interested into what I'm thinking and why I'm even going this direction. And if you're curious about that, I'm going to give you those answers. So, let's get to it with my reasons of why I can't stay a Protestant.
The number one reason, the biggest reason, the most colossal reason why I think that that is what's missing in the Protestant church is the Eucharist. I grew up being taught that communion was mainly a symbol to remember Jesus by and the sacrifice that he made for us. But the eukarist in fact was not seen as purely symbolic until the 16th century after the Protestant Reformation. But when I started reading the early church fathers, they were emphatic over the fact that the eukarist was truly the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. Around 107 AD, Ignatius of Antioch explicitly described the Eucharist as the actual flesh of Jesus. And in 155 AD, Justin Martyr wrote that the bread and the wine were not merely just pieces of food. And I was like, what are you talking about? That seems like the weirdest thing in the world. That seems like cannibalism in a way. But then I looked at scripture and Jesus discussed this with his disciples that his flesh was true food and his blood was true drink. and unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you." And he continued on with this. And he doubled down so much that people were like, "Lord, this is hard. This is a hard teaching." And lots of his disciples left him because of it. And instead of correcting them, saying, "Oh, no, no, no, guys, it's just a symbol. It's just a symbol. I don't mean it in a literal way. This is a figurative way." He never corrected them. Instead, he turned to his disciples and he looked at them and he said, "Are you going to leave me too?" and of which Peter was like, "Lord, to whom shall we go?" And so this was an established truth and doctrine within the church that has been believed. Who am I to say that all of the Christians for 1500 years and even Jesus himself, they were wrong. And then all of a sudden I got it right. I couldn't do that. And so then you do have the reformers that came in and started preaching different things and different doctrines. Zwingley was one of the ones that mainly said that the Eucharist was not the body and blood of Jesus. It was symbolic. But yet he completely disagreed with Martin Luther who did believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ within the Eucharist. And also Calvin and all three of those dudes, all three of those reformers, they buted heads about the Eucharist. None of them agreed on anything when it comes to that. And so I had to sit back as somebody who is not a Catholic or an Orthodox person and say, "Well, which one of those guys was right then? I mean, was Martin Luther right? Was was Wingley right? Was Calvin right? I I don't know who was right. So who has the truest interpretation of what Jesus actually meant?" Well, I went into history and I realized, well, if this is what all of the early church was talking about, and if this is what Jesus truly meant within scripture, and this has been a teaching preserved for over 2,000 years at this point, I think I want to do that instead. That's what I've been missing. That's the missing piece. That's where the restlessness in my heart has been this entire time, knowing that something was missing and not understanding what that was. And so for my Catholic or Orthodox friends that have left the church and have become Protestant or atheist or whatever it is, I'm like, "Guys, do you know what? You just left. You left literally the presence, body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus within the Eucharist. How could you leave that behind? I've never had that. I've never had the opportunity to receive that in its fullness, and you left that. I can't wrap my mind around it." So, a lot of learning and unlearning of what the Eucharist actually was historically. and biblically and spiritually was absolutely mind-blowing for me. And now I'm like, I want Jesus in the Eucharist so bad. And I know that it's not there in the Protestant churches that I grew up in because there it's just a symbol. And if there's more, I want more.
The second reason that I just I can't stay in the Protestant churches that I was always in is the focus of worship. Personally, in the churches that I grew up in, the focus of the church service would be on two things, which would mainly be the praise team and the pastor. If the praise team was cohesive enough, if it was excellent enough, if it invoked an emotional response, well, that makes you want to stay at that church because it's fun. And you would associate that emotional response with the move of the Holy Spirit. And then the remainder of the time was given to the pastor, which a mass majority of the church service was centralized and focused on the pastor himself. what he had to say, what he had to say about scripture, what he had to say about the stories that he was going to be telling or the way that he could relate to the congregation with certain life things that we have to go through on a day-to-day basis. And so, if the pastor was charismatic enough or if he had good things to say that we related to or if he invoked an emotional response within us or if he said things that agreed with what I wanted him to say, well, then we would stick around at that church. But then I went to a Catholic mass and the focus of worship was the complete opposite. You have people singing hymns that you do not know and most of the time completely offtune. You have priests that are up there that maybe you don't even fully understand what they're saying because their accents are so thick or they're from like another country or their sermons are so short that it's just not what everybody is focused on. Nobody is focused on the singing in a Catholic church and nobody is focused on how good the priest is. But instead the focus of the worship of a Catholic mass was Jesus on the cross and also the eukarist. That was the focus. You have incense. You have people quoting scripture all at the same time as one unified body. And the level of holiness and reverence that was at a Catholic mass was like nothing I had ever experienced ever. But the reason that holiness was there was because the focus wasn't on a person. The focus wasn't on a performance. The focus was on Jesus Christ. And as I read the early church and read how people really did church services, especially back closer to the time of Jesus, I'm like, of course, it's supposed to be this way. Lots of times I would leave my non-denominational church services, and it was always about what I got out of it and what I received out of that and what God could do for me. But whenever I would go to a Catholic mass, it never was about me. It never was about my emotional response or what God could do for me there in the moment. Even though the Holy Spirit would obviously meet me there, wherever I was, it didn't matter what kind of church service it was, the Holy Spirit will meet you there. But the way that the service is done in a Catholic church, the focus isn't on me. The focus is all on Jesus right there on the cross and also within the Eucharist. And that is where all of our attention and adoration is geared towards. So the relatability of a priest or the excellence of people that are singing in the choir was completely obsolete. It had nothing to do with what the focus was of a church service within a Catholic church. And it just blew my mind. Now again, I've only been to a couple different Catholic masses. I am sure there are some that have excellent priests that are very charismatic and have excellent choirs that are just unbelievable. I know it's out there. But what I'm saying is from my personal experience, I would leave a church if I didn't like the way that worship or the pastor was. I would literally leave those churches. For a Catholic church, none of those things matter. The focus is Jesus within the Eucharist. That is the entire purpose. So the focus of worship and seeing how Catholic and Orthodox traditions are so much closer, identical to the way that the earliest Christians did it. That really drew me in.
The next reason why I feel like I can't stay a Protestant is just the simple reason of authority. In Protestant circles, we are taught that scripture is our final authority. That's exactly what Martin Luther taught, what Zwingley taught, what Calvin taught. But yet, those three guys and all the other reformers, they all butt heads as far as what scripture actually said. None of them agreed on what scripture meant with different forms of doctrine. And so because of their disagreements and breaking off of the Catholic Church and starting their own denominations, now we've got thousands and thousands of different churches, especially in the American West, that believe vastly different things when it comes to scripture and doctrine. Protestants disagree with each other about baptism. They disagree with each other about homosexual relationships. They disagree with each other about communion and spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues or prophecy. Nobody agrees on anything. So my question became, who has the final say? who is able to tell us and say definitively actually this is what scripture means. Actually this is what the church has always taught. Actually this is what Jesus actually meant whenever he was talking about these things. And so that authority has to go back and be traced back all the way to the apostles. And which Christian churches could be traced all the way back to the apostles to where they have the clearest most defined dogma and doctrine within the Christian faith? Which churches can do that? Catholic and Orthodox, which led me to my next reason, which was who am I following? Who who who am I following here as far as the type of church that I'm at? Who established that type of denomination? Who established that church? And which one was the truest and the closest to what the earliest Christians did and believed and taught. So, I looked into the origins of these denominations. The Lutheran church was founded by Martin Luther in 1517. The Anglican or Episcopal Church was founded by King Henry VIII in 1534. The Reformed and Presbyterian denomination was founded by John Calvin and John Knox in the 16th century. The Baptist Church was founded by John Smith in the 17th century. The Methodist Church in the 18th century by John Wesley and his brother Charles. And then the Pentecostal movement which was birthed during the 20th century. And then just non-denominationalism which was people like I don't want no denomination. That was like in the 1970s and ' 80s. And I'm looking at all of this splintering and now we've got thousands of different denominations within the Protestant church that I'm like, bro, we can't have thousands of different truths. There's no way. I want the oldest. I want the most ancient. Even if it triggers me. And nobody is agreeing on anything. So, how am I supposed to know what the truth actually is? Even if we do agree on the fundamentals of Christian doctrine, the fact that we even disagree on the tiniest things makes me very unsettled in my spirit. There has to be a foundational truth somewhere. And there has to be an authority that has preserved this foundational truth for 2,000 years. What is that? And then you look at the Catholic and Orthodox churches which were established in 33 AD by Jesus Christ. And I'm like, I didn't know that. I did not know that. No wonder the early church fathers looks so Catholic. That makes so much sense. And so I can't I can't justify me staying a Protestant under a tradition that some other guy created after the 1500s or beyond. The oldest and the most ancient. That that is all that I want.
And another reason is because of the moral issues and the varying doctrines that are within the Protestant church, especially on three very huge topics that are really talked about within Christian circles. One of them being abortion. Abortion is accepted in some Protestant denominations. And yet, the Catholic Church has never wavered when it comes to their stance on abortion. And believe it or not, the topic of birth control. I know this might be a touchy one, but did you know that birth control was not accepted as okay within Christian circles, including Protestant circles, until after the 1930s? Before that, any type of contraception was an absolute no. No. Because the sacrament of marriage, the whole purpose of it is not only for unity within two people, but also to bring forth life. And the Catholic Church has never wavered on that either. But yet the Protestant church has totally accepted this idea of birth control after the 1930s. And then you look at the topic of marriage, which Protestant denominations nowadays, they're totally cool with homosexuality, with same-sex couples, marrying them. And then you've got the divorce rates. Within the Protestant church, I did not know this, within the Protestant church, married couples that are Protestant have about a 30 to 50% divorce rate. That's very similar to non-Christian married couples as well. You look at the Catholic Church, the divorce rates of Catholic marriages is at 1%. What? And that's because the doctrine on marriage has not changed for 2,000 years. And us as Protestants have become so laxidasical with these very basic things that are talked about in scripture that now we just accept these things as, oh, well, times have changed. No, I I I I don't I don't want to go with the times that are changing. I want to stay with what is unchanged. The one that is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That's what I want. And again, this is no shame on any of my Protestant friends or or people that might believe differently than I do. These are just things that I didn't know, you guys. I had no idea about any of this, about the history of the church, about what the Bible actually says, about what the truest and the oldest and the most ancient things are within the Christian faith. And look, it would be so much easier for me to stay non-denominational, to stay within Protestant circles would be so much easier. I am a South Texas little blonde bumpkin who everything that I've ever known has been Protestant. So to reconcile with the church that Jesus established would not be an easy thing for me. In fact, it would jeopardize a lot. I could lose friendships. I could lose relationships. I could lose speaking events cuz I I'm I'm travel to speak. I I could lose all of that income. Followers on Instagram. Again, all of those are so silly and fleeting. But yet, to lots of people, that's huge. And it's been so comforting for me to read stories of people that have reconciled with the ancient church and have come back to the most original roots of what Christianity is and knowing that I might not be the only one that suffers during a transition like this. They've gone through the same exact thing. But yet the Lord met them in that place because they were seeking the truth. And once they found the most ancient form of the truth, the Lord was able to step in and provide. So, as harmful and painful and lonely as this whole journey kind of has been for me, I'm willing to risk all of it, if this is the truth, I will give up everything if that means that I can have more of Jesus and he's given me more that I never have been able to tap into before. And that does require shedding lots of pride and letting go of biases that I have held on to for literally my entire life. I've been in contact with lots of really cool people in this process. And there was one theology professor. I will never forget this. It was a theology professor that I've been in contact with via email back and forth. And he said something that really stuck with me. And this is what he said. The biggest protection against deception is not critical thinking per se, but humility. Humility leads to truth. I will never unhear that. But for me to know what I know at this point biblically, historically, and doctrinally within the Christian faith, I can't go back. And I know I'm not the only one, too. There's been so many people that have reached out that are on the same path that I'm on. And I even started like a little book club over on Patreon. If you want to join it, you totally could. We read Rome Sweet Home. We're also going to be going through Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist. At this point, I've read so many books on this stuff that I'm just like, dude, you guys, did you know all of this has been done for 2,000 years? I certainly didn't. So, we go through all of these things in the book club. So, I do invite you to join us over on Patreon. The link is in the description. If you want to become an elite member, you can join the book club with us and we do live videos and read through all this stuff. But, in the meantime, continue following this series. Follow this journey with me. Subscribe on the YouTube channel again, Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and share this video with a friend if it resonates with you. Again, my name is Hannah Cruz. I'm on this wild journey. What's up with this Catholic thing is a series that we're doing right here on the Lighten Up podcast. We'll see you next time.
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