My wife and I were raised Evangelical Protestants, and if you would have told us a year ago that we would be Catholics today, we would have laughed. Becoming Catholic was not a prospect we were particularly happy with; when we first began to be influenced positively by things Catholic, our feelings could probably best be summarized as, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”
I am sorry to have to portray the relationship between certain Evangelical Protestants and the Catholic Church in adversarial language, but that is how we were raised. We were taught that the Catholic Church had usurped the Bible by adding layers of “human tradition” to it and that the Church deceives millions by teaching them that they are saved by their good works. We were nothing if not staunchly Protestant. But now, by God’s grace, we have come to see that only in the Catholic Church does the fullness of Christian faith reside.
My own journey to Catholicism started when, fresh out of college, I attended a prominent Evangelical Protestant seminary. This school is well known in Evangelical circles for its commitment to the Bible as the sole authority for Christian faith and practice. The faculty and students staunchly and enthusiastically defend the Bible’s authority, inspiration, and inerrancy. This is not done in a dogmatic, unintellectual, “Fundamentalist” fashion. We learned Greek and Hebrew, methods of exegesis and principles of hermeneutics, history and theology. We read the works of liberal scholars and learned to engage them on their own intellectual grounds. In short, we took our Bible very seriously. It was a stimulating environment in which we were encouraged to think for ourselves and formulate theological positions well grounded in the objective evidence available in Scripture.
Interestingly, we never read the early Church Fathers, nor any Catholic theologians except Augustine (because he is considered a sort of proto-Calvinist) and Aquinas (because his impact on Christian theology was so profound as to be difficult to ignore). Generally we just skipped straight from the apostles to the Reformers, so my exposure to Catholic ideas was virtually nonexistent. Yet two things significantly influenced my thinking with respect to Catholicism, although I didn’t know this at the time.
First, as I wrestled with the Bible and studied it in detail, I began to realize that it didn’t support the theology that I had been brought up to believe. I changed from premillennial to amillennial eschatology; I ceased believing in the common Protestant belief of the eternal security of the Christian; I abandoned the doctrine of justification by faith alone, one of the pillars of the Reformation; and I began to hold a sacramental view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
I felt like a bit of a theological “misfit” because no Protestant denomination held precisely the same views that I held, and this bothered me. Some of my professors assured me that it was fine to hold independent opinions on various issues, so long as one’s views were consonant with the Bible and lay generally within the broad spectrum of “orthodox” Christian belief. But this sort of maverick approach to Christian doctrine concerned me; what is the basis of Christian unity if we formulate customized doctrines? Isn’t it precisely because of these differences that Protestants have been fragmenting and dividing for centuries?
Although I didn’t feel called to start my own denomination, I didn’t feel theologically comfortable in the existing ones either. In fact, I chose to keep some of my personal views to myself in my local church, for fear of others’ reaction. This confusion over Bible interpretation among Protestants made me question–at least on a semi-conscious level–whether commitment to the inspiration and authority of the Bible is really the unifying factor that Evangelical Protestants think it is.
The second factor that changed my thinking was exposure to unorthodox views propounded both by liberal Protestant theologians and by conservative Protestant groups. The proponents of these views appeal to the Bible for support, but many of their doctrines are innovative; they have never been held in the entire history of the Church.
Instinctively I knew that these ideas were unorthodox; many of them ran directly against the great creeds of the Church. But what was my standard of orthodoxy, the Bible or the creeds? If I appealed to creed or “the universal belief of the Church” in order to declare something unorthodox, was I not following something besides Scripture alone? This raised questions that I couldn’t answer: What is orthodoxy? What is the standard of Christian orthodoxy?
I began to suspect that it couldn’t be just the Bible, because none of us could agree on what the Bible says. All appeals to the Bible can be countered with a different interpretation or an outright rejection of the authority of the Bible. Increasingly I turned to the creeds and to a nebulous collection of the “universal beliefs of the Church” to assure myself that what I believed was orthodox.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my wife, Lorene, also was being prepared for our journey into the Catholic Church. While in college she attended a Reformed Baptist church. This exposed her to a sacramental understanding of the Lord’s Supper; in turn she influenced me on this doctrine.
One of her sisters–whose husband was raised Catholic–would occasionally point to the disarray among Protestants and ask how they could all claim to hold true Christian doctrine, yet disagree on so many things. My wife had no good answer to this question and, because of her Protestant upbringing, didn’t think there really was an answer. She stuck to the idea that a person should read the Bible and ask for the Holy Spirit’s guidance. That response seemed inadequate, but it was all that she knew.
About two years ago I was in a Salvation Army store, rummaging through the used books. I saw a copy of Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating and leafed through it out of curiosity. It was only one dollar, but I almost put it back since it was, after all, about Catholic theology. Still, I thought to myself, the chapter headings are interesting, and it couldn’t hurt to know what Catholics say about these things.
I purchased the book and began to read it on my morning train ride into Chicago. I try to read sympathetically, and I conceded that if I stepped into Catholic shoes–especially with regard to how Catholics view Scripture–then Catholic theology seemed coherent and made sense. The book cleared up misconceptions I had about what Catholics really believe.
I shared these observations with my wife. That was a mistake. We got into an argument right there on the train. “You’re not going to become a Catholic, are you?” she blustered at me. She told me later that all she could think was, “How am I going to explain this to my family? I married a Protestant seminary student and he turns Catholic!” Backpedaling quickly, I told her that I was just playing devil’s advocate, and the whole topic went on a back burner for a while.
Still, my respect for Catholics grew steadily. I very much admire Pope John Paul II–his unequivocal stand against immorality, his refusal to water down his message to our President and to the people of the United States, and his calling the youth of America back to Christianity. I read Charles Colson’s book The Body and was impressed by the role the Catholic and Orthodox Churches played in bringing down Communism. I saw Catholics reaching out and meeting so many physical needs in the name of Christ. I had for a long time been disappointed with our Evangelical churches because we complained a lot about the problems in our society, but didn’t do much about them. I saw Catholics in our town putting their faith into practice–feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless, caring for unwed mothers and their children.
In May 1993, because of some pro-Catholic statements I made in a Bible study, a couple that we knew from the Baptist church we attended told us that they were exploring Catholicism. Dave had attended the same seminary that I graduated from, so we had similar theological backgrounds. We talked for an afternoon about things that we found attractive about the Catholic Church. I ended up lending Keating’s book to Dave, and he lent me a tape series by Scott Hahn, a former Presbyterian minister who has become Catholic. I enjoyed the tapes, but at the time was not fully persuaded by Hahn’s arguments (only later would I realized how much he had influenced me). Nothing much happened, seemingly, until September, when Dave brought the book back. He told us that he had resigned from the deacon board at our church and that he and his family had begun to attend Mass. We were surprised, but curious. I look up to Dave as a spiritual role model. He is a solid man, and I knew he would not do something like this lightly. Lorene and I knew that Dave’s news would not get a warm reception at our Baptist church, and we were determined to maintain the friendship and to support him and his wife in their decision.
We invited them over a few weeks later to talk. We just asked questions, not trying to talk them out of their decision to become Catholic, but trying to find out what had compelled them to make such a move. The more we talked the more excited we all got. On point after point Catholic doctrine was biblical, logical, consistent. It seemed to encompass the entire Bible, including the problem passages, rather than focusing on a select group of verses to support a particular position. It seemed that within a Catholic framework, many of these problem passages were no longer a problem.
We found too that we had seriously misunderstood much of what the Catholic Church actually teaches, and we found that there were good answers to all the questions we had. Our friends stayed until midnight, and, when they left, my wife and I were like the disciples on the road to Emmaus; our ears burned with this new knowledge. That weekend neither of us could get it out of our heads; we could barely sleep.
My wife–much to my surprise–began talking about the “inevitability” of us becoming Catholic. I was shocked that she, of all people, was so moved toward Catholicism. But once she understood and believed the basic principles of papal authority, the role of the magisterium, and the place of tradition in Christian doctrine, she felt that all the rest must follow. I was not there yet; I had too many questions, although I had to admit that in my heart I wanted it to be true.
We began a serious exploration of this new faith. As a result of this study, I found that in all of the areas of theology in which I had changed my views, I had either arrived at or was on the way toward orthodox Catholic doctrine. I confirmed that much of my prior “knowledge” about Catholic doctrine was at best distorted and at worst simply wrong.
In the past, when I bothered to read about Catholicism at all, I consulted Protestant sources. These tended to cast Catholicism in an unfavorable light and often, whether wittingly or unwittingly, misrepresented what the Catholic Church teaches. Reading from orthodox Catholic sources about Catholic doctrine and the support present for it was eye-opening and challenging. I was forced to rethink issues I had taken for granted.
Through this study I came to see that, although the Protestant Reformation was touted as a return to “Scripture alone” over against Catholic “traditions,” in fact the major theological tenets of the Reformation cannot be supported from the Bible. The Reformers made their break with the Catholic Church based primarily on three doctrines: justification by faith alone, sola scriptura or the Bible alone as our authority, and a repudiation of the doctrine of transubstantiation.
While still in seminary I had abandoned the doctrine of justification by faith alone because it was unbiblical. The next watershed for me was when I began to believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Aleady I viewed the Lord’s Supper as a sacrament, but now I saw that Scripture teaches something greater, that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of our Lord. Even more compelling to me was the fact that this was the orthodox view of the Church for 1,500 years, before the Protestant reformers came along and convinced our branch of Christianity that it just wasn’t so, that what the Church had for all those centuries held as her deepest and most precious mystery was, in fact, no mystery at all but just a memorial service!
I went back and read the writings of the earliest Church Fathers–Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Augustine–and found that they all believed in the Real Presence. I could no longer swallow our Protestant assertion that millions upon millions of Christians, including some who knew the apostles personally, had been misled by the Holy Spirit until Calvin and Zwingli came along and set everybody straight. Although these Reformers couldn’t agree among themselves what the Lord’s Supper meant, they all insisted that the Catholics must be wrong.
The last straw for my status as a Protestant was when sola scriptura–the doctrine that the Bible alone is our authority in matters of faith–fell apart. I had read in Keating’s book and had heard in Hahn’s tape that the doctrine is not taught in Scripture, that Scripture nowhere claims to be the sole rule for our faith. Many passages indicate that the traditions of the apostles, whether written or oral, are authoritative and that Christians should believe and follow them (see especially 1 Cor. 11:2; 1 Thess. 2:13; 2Thess. 2:15; 2 Tim. 2:2; 2 Pet. 3:1-3).
The Catholic Church teaches that the Church is the guardian of this deposit of God’s revelation to the apostles. So does Paul, when he calls the Church (not the Bible) “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). Always I shrugged off this argument, although I could not counter it. (2 Timothy 3:16 came to mind immediately, but this verse only says that the Bible is profitable for correction, training, and so on, which is not the same as saying that it is the only source for these things.)
One afternoon the consequences of these facts hit home. The foundation of my Protestantism was kicked out from under me. We Protestants insisted that all of our doctrine must be found in the Bible, but the doctrine of sola scriptura is itself not found in the Bible. Then I realized that the Protestant position was based fatally on logical incoherence.
Once I became convinced that the Reformers were wrong in these three areas, there was very little support left for the Reformation at all. While virtually everybody, whether Catholic or Protestant, will admit that the Catholic Church needed reform during Luther’s day (even the popes said so), it was difficult for me to see how reforming the Church consisted of smashing it into thousands of splinter groups, all claiming to hold true doctrine but interpreting the Bible differently and rarely if ever cooperating with each other. The continuous division and rupture, schism upon schism, that characterizes Protestantism is impossible to justify and is profoundly unbiblical (John 10:16, 17:20-23 and 1 Cor. 1-3).
Having worked through these and many other issues, my wife and I felt that there were only two paths left: a descent into rationalistic agnosticism or an ascent into the fullness of Christian faith found in Catholicism. This was no choice at all, since we loved Jesus too much to become agnostics. We were confirmed and received into the Catholic Church on February 8, 1994. We are thrilled to be Catholic, even though the transition–particularly telling family and friends about our decision–was difficult.
Because culturally the Catholic Church is different from Evangelical Protestantism, we are still in a process of acclimation, but I feel much like Cardinal Newman, who said after his conversion to Catholicism that he felt as if he had finally come into port from a rough sea. No longer do we have to be “blown about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14). We don’t have to wonder any longer if what we believe is orthodox.
A wonderful group of Catholic priests and lay people have rallied around us and have ministered Christ’s love through their prayers and support during our pilgrimage into the Church. Our journey has opened up for us new vistas of Christian worship in the liturgy, the incredible richness of the sacraments, and the vast treasury of Catholic spirituality. All these confirm to us that we have truly come home.