Sacramental Theology | Prepared to Give an Answer

Church traditions and early Christian texts often use language I used to be wholly unfamiliar with growing up in an Evangelical Protestant context—entering their circles brings you to a lot of strange Latin phrases, jargon, and philosophical vocabulary. One of the first examples of this I encountered was the idea of “sacramental” theology.

The idea is so simple, but it changes everything: it’s the belief that physical things can have spiritual effects.

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Prepared to Give an Answer: Introduction

There’s probably not a more honest way of framing everything I want to say about my present journey with Christ than this: I’m so tired.

You would think that the quintessential “I went to college and went so much deeper in my walk with Jesus!” story would be marked by evangelical zeal, intellectual curiosity, and a voracious appetite for more of Christ, His Church, and His teachings. I did go to college (I graduate this April), and I have gone fathoms deeper in my walk with Christ; but my story could not be more opposite in so many ways.

My journey over the last four years has been marked, instead, by spiritual isolation, intellectual burnout, and a reluctance so great that I’ve used the phrase “kicking and screaming” to describe it more times than I can count. I have drug my feet to Scripture, Church history, and back again, through countless church buildings and traditions, and over a thousand pages of theology from Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, to Chesterton, Kierkegaard, Wesley, Lewis. I’ve fasted, prayed, cried, discerned, talked late into countless nights with friends and mentors, begged my God to lead me into what was true and away from what was false.

And now, I have arrived on the doorstep of the Catholic Church.

For so many people I have spoken with, this fact alone invalidates every moment of the journey before it. 

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