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In June of 2012 my wife and I were
confirmed and received into the Catholic Church. Many friends and
family would probably be shocked to hear of this, and I am surprised
myself. But throughout my adult life, there have been hints and signs
pointing to this, and a yearning in my heart that I now believe is
being fulfilled in union with the church of the ancient fathers.
I was raised in a small-town
Southern Baptist church in Virginia where I, along with my sister, my
two brothers, and our parents, attended Sunday School and Church
nearly every Sunday that I can remember. In my early teen years I
responded to a preacher's invitation to accept Christ as my Lord and
savior and I was baptized. The experience of the waters of baptism
seemed to be one of re-birth. I felt as though my sins were washed
away, and there was a new beginning and opportunity for me ahead.
However, I did not find much growth in grace during my later high
school years, and I went away to college in 1970 very disappointed
with my hometown and the Christians that I knew.
I was a religiously-interested
skeptic at that time. But a time of soul-searching and contacts with
evangelical friends at college led me back to faith. I begin to
seriously pray and study scripture. Within a couple of years I began
to consider theological seminary and preparation for ministry.
During these college years I was
involved with a campus ministry (The Navigators) that sought to make
disciples of the Lord Jesus through a process of disciple making they
saw outlined in II Timothy 2:2, “...and what you have heard from me
before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to
teach others also.” This campus ministry taught me a deep respect
for the Scriptures, but now I think I learned some rather dubious
interpretations of the Scripture. Surely Paul’s words to Timothy
are in the context of establishing apostolic leadership for the
church. Timothy was a bishop, ordained by Paul to have oversight over
the Christians in Ephesus and perhaps others cities. Timothy was to
ordain elders and deacons, root out heresy, and preserve the faith.
The context was nothing like what we were attempting to do with young
college men and women.
We tended to miss the corporate
dimension of the New Testament faith—discipleship for us was a very
personal, individual thing. During the last year or two of college,
some of us began to see the inadequacy of the model we had been
taught, and our campus fellowship began to have more the atmosphere
of a house church, including celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
I had come to see that the New
Testament had much to say about the Body of Christ—the Church—a
divinely appointed organization with structure, discipline, and
offices. I finally joined a small Presbyterian church, though I was
not yet fully “reformed” or Presbyterian in my theology. The
doctrine of the Church along with worship and sacraments would become
a major area of interest in my future studies.
Following graduation I was
married; a year later we were blessed with a child. Then in the
summer of 1976 we moved to Jackson, MS where I began studies at
Reformed Seminary. Our move several hundred miles away from family
was a significant step of faith. The Lord provided our needs.
We lived in an apartment a few
miles from campus in downtown Jackson, just a few blocks from the
state capitol building. Also downtown was a Catholic church. One
Saturday I rode out on my bike for a time of prayer, and passed this
church. I stopped, went in, and noticed the inscription over the
doorway, taken from John 10:16: “there shall be one flock, one
shepherd.” I entered the sanctuary, impressed with its beauty. I
prayed. Something stirred within me. I went away with a small glimmer
of Catholicism traced on my consciousness.
In the first year of seminary we
studied church history, one of my favorite fields of study. I went
beyond the required readings and explored the writings of the early
fathers. I found there a world very different from that of the
evangelical and reformed Christianity of my experience.
During this time we began to
worship with a house church that was called “New Covenant Catholic
Church.” This was a group of young people, mostly in their 20’s
and 30’s, who were led by a group of men formerly in leadership
positions with the evangelical ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.
Mildly charismatic, much of the teaching of this group was concerned
with recovering the teaching of the early church. There was also a
heavy emphasis of “shepherding,” which was found in many new
house churches in that era. We left this fellowship, mostly because
of this “shepherding” approach to community that we found heavy
handed and suspicious. A few years later, this group became part of
the Evangelical Orthodox Church, which was later received by the
Antiochian Orthodox Church.
I was seeking a more ancient,
catholic expression of the faith, which these folks also were
seeking, though at the time we were there, they had not yet quite
figured out where they were going. The rest of our years in Jackson
we worshiped with a non-denominational church that was heavily
involved in social outreach and community development. I never felt
really at home there theologically, but I admired and supported the
mission work of this community, and it was a place of good fellowship
and support. This was a church that transcended racial and cultural
lines—a thing not often seen in the Deep South in those days, at
least in my experience. But it was like the kingdom of God should be.
I later found this concern for racial inclusiveness and social
justice very effectively realized in the Catholic Church.
My seminary experience was an
enjoyable one. I studied hard; it was intellectually fulfilling; I
made good grades. I grew more Calvinistic in my thinking, but was
slow to embrace a consistently “reformed” way of thinking. To my
shame, however, it seems I absorbed an anti-Catholic bias during my
time there, or perhaps the bias was already there, and the seminary
only reinforced it. The reality was that I knew hardly any Catholics,
and never seriously studied what the Catholic Church taught.
I did come to embrace, however, a
deep respect for the ancient creeds, and therefore for the teaching
of the early church. It was my understanding that the reformers also
were going back to the fathers, and reforming the church to what it
was before the corruption of the Middle Ages. I have since learned
that reformation era scholarship knew comparatively little of the
writings of the earliest centuries beyond the New Testament. While
Lutherans retained much of Catholic tradition and liturgy, the
reformed, and especially the Presbyterians, generally threw out
anything that could not be found in the Bible.
The principle of “sola
scriptura” was the touchstone of orthodoxy at my seminary. It was a
given, an axiom, not debatable. To question this principle was
practically to question the faith itself. One might as well object to
the deity of Christ as to question that the Bible alone is the final
authority for faith and practice. I don’t think I ever asked, “but
does the Bible itself teach that the Bible is the only authority?”
Now I have come to see that the Bible does not teach that the Bible
is the only authority. And I now see that the Bible does teach that
Christians are to observe the traditions, and the teachings, as well
as the writings of the apostles.
I will credit my seminary
professors for clarifying for me the shaping of the New Testament
canon. I did learn there that it was the church that determined the
canon. I don’t think the implications of this were drawn out for me
then, as I see them now, of course. Nevertheless, the historical
reality is that the church did form a canon. It was not left up to
the interpretation of individuals.
By the time of my seminary
graduation, I had come to embrace most of the reformed faith as
taught in the Westminster Standards (the doctrinal standards of
historic Presbyterianism), though I could not see the teaching of a
“limited atonement” in the scriptures. This made me what we
called a “four-point” as opposed to a “five-point” Calvinist.
I struggled with the doctrine of infant baptism until my senior year.
Writing a research paper attempting to prove the opposite, I became
convinced that infant baptism was proper.
After graduation, I was called to
a small Presbyterian Church near Chattanooga, where I was ordained
and served as a pastor. A few years later my family, now with two
daughters and two sons, moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, where I was
pastor of another Presbyterian church for several years. In
Shreveport I first had the opportunity to come to know several
Catholics, both clergy and laity. In knowing these dear Christians,
many of my prejudices against Catholicism were demolished.
In Shreveport, I was active in the
right to life movement, eventually heading up and helping reestablish
the local chapter of the National Right to Life committee. Of course,
many of the most dedicated advocates for the life of the unborn are
Catholic. As I got to know them, I found them to be devout, sincere,
men and women who loved Christ. I was able to spend time with several
priests, and once had a visit with the local Catholic bishop. I was
always warmly received, and my position as a protestant pastor
acknowledged with respect. During this time my wife taught at the
local Catholic high school, which gave us both more opportunity to
see the world of Catholic life and faith. One of our Catholic
friends from Shreveport has prayed for me over the years, and has
gently urged me towards considering the Catholic Church, with gifts
of tapes and books now and then. I now believe her faithfulness in
prayer and giving were divinely instrumental in our coming into
communion with the Catholic Church.
I returned to Virginia a few years
later, as pastor of another Presbyterian church. But I had become
increasingly restless in pastoral ministry, and resigned from the
pastorate to open a bookshop in downtown Lynchburg. At this same
time, my wife and I became involved in the work of a classical,
Christian School, associated with the Reformed Episcopal Church. The
small parish affiliated with the school was without a minister, and I
was asked to preach for them on a few occasions. This became a
regular, part-time job, and as I learned the prayer book liturgy and
studied the Episcopal tradition, I found it increasingly appealing.
In January of 1997 I was received into that denomination and became
rector of that parish.
Over nearly fifteen years of using
the prayer book and studying Anglicanism, I moved farther away from
my Calvinistic perspective, though for most of my time in that church
I would have thought of myself as an evangelical catholic. That is, I
had a high regard for the ancient church, particularly the creeds and
the liturgy (in a fairly low-church expression). Yet I came to
believe in a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the
sacramental efficacy of baptism. I once would have seen these as
primarily symbolic, now I regard these as vehicles of grace, and
among the ordinary appointed means for salvation. I came to believe
that “outside the church there is no salvation,” that the Church
is the Ark of God, but I still thought of that “one, holy, Catholic
church” as the “invisible” church, as it was obviously broken
into too many pieces to think of it as having a visible unity.
But, if the church is one, as Paul
declares, “there is one body and one spirit,... one Lord, one
faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:4.5) how is that unity to be known
today? If our Lord prays for the unity of the church, what is our
responsibility to seek and affect that unity?
Protestants seem to love the hymn
“Onward Christian Soldiers.” But how can we sing this line in
good conscience: “We are not divided, all one body we, one in hope
and doctrine, one in charity?” I am not aware of anything in
current hymnody that seems so profoundly false as this statement. The
disunity of the church is a dreadful scandal, and it seems to me that
any serious Christian should do all in his or her power to remedy the
disunity of the church. It now seems to be highly ironic that
Biblical literalists interpret a concept such as the “body
of Christ” in primarily spiritual terms. Isn’t a “body” a
material thing? Shouldn’t we be able to see a body? Yet over and
over, Protestants interpret the body of Christ, the Church, as
primarily an invisible, spiritual entity.
When I was still a Presbyterian,
the many divisions among the heirs of Calvin often distressed me. In
the Anglican world it is no better, or perhaps it is worse. Dozens of
small “Anglican” groups can be found on the Internet. Apparently
it is fairly easy to find a bishop who is willing to lay hands of
“consecration” on another, making another bishop and another
Anglican jurisdiction.
Throughout the protestant world,
it is the same. For any reason a person may start a church, and a new
schism, a new denomination, is born. This seems to be the inevitable
result of the doctrine of sola scriptura and the lack of a
teaching authority or magesterium. In the protestant world, the final
arbiter of doctrine is not the Bible, nor the tradition, nor a
council, but the sovereign individual. It is one man’s
interpretation of the Bible over against another’s. When a man
says, “the Bible alone is my authority,” what he really means is
“only my interpretation of the Bible is my authority,” or else he
cedes that role to some pastor or teacher that he, for whatever
reason, has come to trust. Protestants complain the Catholics have a
Pope, yet they don’t see that Protestants also have popes: indeed
there may be as many popes as there are Protestants.
Of course, my reformed friends
would see the problem, and deny it is this bad. For this reason we
have the confessions, they would say—the Westminster Confession,
the Heidelberg catechism, etc. Many of my reformed friends seem to
think the Calvinism as articulated by the Westminster standards is
the full-flowering of Christianity. But why should anyone regard the
assembly of pastors and theologians at Westminster as more likely to
have the right interpretation of the Scripture than the councils that
produced the Lutheran statements of faith, or, for that matter, the
Council of Trent? But even when we have confessions of faith, we must
interpret those confessions. Whose interpretation shall be regarded
as most accurate and reliable? We go from disputes about the meaning
of scripture, to disputes about the meaning of the confessions. And
so in recent years we have seen the sad phenomenon of pastors of one
Presbyterian denomination pronouncing anathemas upon ministers of
other Presbyterian denominations for not holding the same
interpretation of the Westminster standards on the doctrine of
justification as held by themselves.
Another largely unexamined
presupposition of the whole protestant project as it stands today is
this: using the tools of modern Biblical exegesis, we can discern the
true meaning of Scripture. I don’t know why I never saw this
before, but in recent months it seems an absurd notion that a modern
exegete can jump back over 2,000 years and have a better
understanding of the New Testament and the teaching of the apostles
than did those men we call the early church fathers. If a modern
scholar interprets the New Testament in a way not in accord with the
Didache, or Clement, or Ignatius, or Irenaeus, or Cyprian, who is
more likely to be right? Until recently, I tended to read the fathers
and found affirmation for what I already believed. If they
contradicted my confessional stance (first Westminster, then The
Thirty-Nine articles) I would set the earlier teaching aside, or
perhaps intend to come back to it later. But some of these questions
concern the very core of the Christian faith. One may put off
deciding for a time, but one can’t do that forever. One must take a
stand eventually. If I must decide, who is more likely to have the
correct interpretation? I think a safer bet, or a more logical,
reasonable decision, would be to side with the early church fathers.
Another significant change in my
perception of spiritual reality has to do with the doctrine of the
communion of saints. In the creed I have confessed to believe in the
communion of the saints, but what is this really? A few years ago I
discovered the Charles Wesley hymn, “Let saints on earth in concert
sing, with those whose work is done; for all the servants of our king
in heaven and earth are one…E’en now we join our hands with those
who went before, and greet the ever-living bands, on the eternal
shore.” Hearing this for the first time moved me deeply, and the
vision it unfolds is a wonderful one. Those who have crossed the
stream of death are still living; they sing with us. If they may sing
with us, why may they not pray for us? If we are in communion with
them, why may we not seek their intercessions for us?
As I was drawn to the doctrine of
the communion of saints, I happened to watch a video on the life of
Edith Stein. She was a remarkable woman: a Jewish university teacher
of philosophy in Germany between the wars; as a young adult, she
became an atheist, then later was converted to Christ and became a
Carmelite nun. She died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. She was
later canonized as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. I was moved by
her story, and found myself invoking her prayers for my son. I no
longer find it a strange thing to think of asking for the prayers of
the Blessed Virgin, or other saints. There is an inscription from
around AD 250 that says, “Pray for your parents Matronata Matrona.
She lived one year, fifty-two days.” What a beautiful vision this
brings to mind: an infant alive in the presence of God and the holy
angels and interceding for her parents.
I have always been intrigued by
the parables of the kingdom. The theme of the kingdom of God is so
crucial to understanding the teaching of our Lord. How closely
related are the church and kingdom? Are they the same? Is the church
the gate of the kingdom, or something like the visible expression in
time of the timeless, transcendent kingdom? That they are very
closely related seems clear in such passages as Matthew 16:18-20.
Jesus speaks of the building of the church on the Rock (Petros)
and the keys of the kingdom are given to Peter.
Surely the kingdom of God is not a
democracy. A flock of sheep is not a democracy. Families are not
democracies. Kingdoms have a top-down government. Several of the
kingdom parables speak of a ruler, or landowner, going away and
leaving a trusted servant in charge. Peter and the apostles are the
trusted servants. The New Testament clearly puts Peter in a position
of some prestige or respect above the rest of the twelve. It would
seem reasonable, even necessary, that upon Peter’s death, another
would take his place. A precedent for filling the place of a departed
apostle is set in Acts 1, with the appointment of Matthias to take
the place of Judas.
Therefore, it is surely not
unreasonable to expect that the rule of the Church, or Kingdom of God
on earth, should be under a visible head or regent in place of the
Lord and King, Jesus. If anyone fills that role in the church between
AD 30 and 60, then it is surely Peter. And it would then seem most
reasonable that upon his demise, someone would be recognized to take
his place. Of course, the records from the second century on indicate
that this is indeed what happened--the fathers are careful to trace
the succession of the bishops of Rome back to Peter (see Irenaeus,
Against Heresies, Book 3, chapters 2-4).
Irenaeus’ Against Heresies
seems especially appropriate for modern times when heresy and schism
abound. Irenaeus counsels: “What if there should be a dispute about
some matter of moderate importance? Should we not run to the oldest
churches, where the apostles themselves were known, and find from
them the clear and certain answer to the problem now being
raised?”(Book 3, Chapter 4.1). Ireaneus counsels that to settle
disputes we need both scripture and tradition. For this tradition we
look ad fontes, to the source in the oldest churches.
Cardinal Newman famously observed:
“to be deep in history is to cease to be protestant.” I found
this to be true in my case. As I read more church history, especially
the early fathers, and reformation history from Catholic writers, my
protestant viewpoint was slowly eroded. It became clear to me that if
there is one church which Jesus established, the Catholic church
under the bishop of Rome has the most clear and convincing claim to
be that church.
It became to me then a matter of
conscience. I was convinced that the denominations to which I had
belonged are in schism from the one church which our Lord
established. I came to believe that to continue in separation from
that church would be to sin against my conscience and my Lord. My
wife and I enrolled in our local parish's RCIA program (Rite of
Christian Initiation for Adults) and after several months of study,
we were received into the Church on June 24, 2012.
Though I am deeply sorry for the
schism of protestantism, and my part in perpetuating that schism, I
rejoice in the ministry I have received from the churches and
teachers of my former denominations. In my childhood church I became
aware of the reality of God, was first awakened to faith and was
baptized. In the college ministry of the Navigators I was taught to
be zealous for Scripture and learned a concern for evangelism and
mission. In my seminary I was instructed by good and godly men who
taught me to think and helped me learn to write. In my sojourn among
Presbyterians I saw a zeal for social concern and among the Anglicans
I learned to love beautiful liturgy. Along the way many Catholic
ministries such as Catholic Answers, as well as local parishes and
friends have been been very helpful. And finally, through the Coming
Home Network's ministry, especially through the Deep in History
conference, we were enabled to see the intellectual integrity,
spiritual depth and amazing beauty of Catholic faith. Along the way
our gracious good Shepherd has patiently led us, and we now rejoice
to be at home in his flock. Thanks be to God.
The Feast of St. Dominic, 2012
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