If you ever find yourself arguing about a particular Bible passage or point of Catholic doctrine with a non-Catholic Christian, it might prove helpful to take a step back and focus on the bigger picture. Even if you are not able to respond to each individual objection to the Catholic Faith, you can rest assured that the Catholic Church is the most internally coherent and consistent of all Christian traditions. I was raised a Protestant Christian, but when I became convinced of the consistency of the Catholic Church, the door was opened for my conversion.
I grew up in a vibrant, conservative Episcopalian parish in Houston, Texas. I can’t remember a time when I did not have faith in Jesus Christ and in the Bible as the word of God. The fact that I was an Episcopalian did not seem significant to me; I was simply a Christian.
When I went to college, my number-one priority was to find a good Christian fellowship. I quickly settled on Campus Crusade for Christ, a nondenominational group focused on growing in faith and sharing the gospel. All was well for two years: I grew in my knowledge and love of the Bible and developed wonderful, Christ-centered friendships. I worshiped at an Evangelical, nondenominational church popular with fellow “Crusaders.”
Aren’t Catholics Christians too?
My first step toward the Catholic Church—though I didn’t know it at the time—was an unexpected encounter with anti-Catholicism within the Evangelical Protestant world. It didn’t sit right with me: “Aren’t Catholics Christians too?” I thought. A search on the subject led me to the book Catholic and Christian by Alan Schreck. I was struck by the logical, biblical basis for Catholic practices and beliefs such as the authority of the pope and the intercession of the saints.
Meanwhile, I began to hunger for the liturgical worship of my youth and started attending nearby Episcopalian services. When I met Robert, my future husband (and a cradle Catholic) at the beginning of our last year of college, I was already disposed to consider joining the Catholic Church.
After graduation, I moved back to Houston to work as a bilingual elementary teacher and maintained a long-distance relationship with Robert, who was living with his family in Southern California. Naturally, I began worshiping again at the Episcopalian church of my childhood. One of the priests there found out that I was considering becoming Catholic. He strongly counseled me against it, saying things such as, “You know, they still have indulgences.” I didn’t know enough to be able to respond to that objection.
Catholics at a Protestant School
I had decided to pursue theological studies, and the Episcopal priest persuaded me that I should not convert out of convenience but should be truly convinced. That moment of conviction did not arrive until after Robert and I were engaged and I had started studying at Fuller Theological Seminary, a nondenominational Protestant school in Pasadena, California.
My first quarter at Fuller there “just happened” to be three on-fire Catholics in my little Hebrew class, two of whom were Michael Barber and his future wife, Kimberly Gilmore. Robert, though a faithful Catholic, was not at that time able to argue persuasively for the Catholic Church. (By the grace of God, that has changed!) But these fellow theology students were.
MacIntyre on traditions and their rationality
In coursework around the time I was deciding to become Catholic, I encountered the work of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, himself a convert. MacIntyre argues for a return to Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics in his philosophical “trilogy” After Virtue, Whose Justice?, Which Rationality?, and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. In the course of his writings, MacIntyre articulates a definition of traditions and suggests ways to judge them that I found helpful in describing my own journey to the Catholic Church. MacIntyre presented many of these ideas in an article titled “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science” (1977). All MacIntyre quotations here come from that article. (See “For Further Reading” this page for the URL to access it online.)
MacIntyre’s definition of tradition recognizes that each tradition—be it scientific, religious, ethical, or otherwise—has its own formative texts, its own style of reasoning, and its own experiential confirmation. A person can never stand from some objective point outside of all traditions and evaluate them, for traditions themselves “are the bearers of reason.” Yet, MacIntyre insists, we do not have to succumb to the paralysis of relativism or the “incurable and ultimately fatal” disease of extreme skepticism.
His proposal for avoiding relativism examines how a particular tradition has fared throughout history. As the tradition has faced outside challenges and internal crises, if it has coped with those challenges and emerged stronger for having met them, its internal rationality is confirmed, and adherence to it is shown to be reasonable. If the tradition has not been able to resolve such conflicts satisfactorily, then its rationality is weakened, and adherence to it is less reasonable.
Evolving belief systems
When we speak of the formative texts of all Christian sub-traditions, we automatically think of the Bible as what holds them together. Yet, as I discovered, the Catholic Church has a unique relationship to Scripture that Protestant denominations cannot claim. As I learned about the formation of the biblical canon in my church history classes at Fuller, I realized that the Evangelical Protestant tradition I had been a part of in college did not possess the resources to explain satisfactorily why the Bible is inspired revelation.
In MacIntyre’s holistic way of thinking, Christians do not need to justify taking their Scriptures as inspired, for to assume their divine inspiration is part of what is means to be Christian. Yet as I learned more about the Catholic tradition, I came to see flaws in the Protestant ones.
As a former student of English literature, I was particularly drawn to MacIntyre’s use of the concept of dramatic narrative to describe our evolving belief systems. He describes Hamlet back from Wittenberg and trying to reconcile competing versions of the same events: “His task is to reconstitute, to rewrite that narrative, reversing his understanding of past events in the light of present responses to his probing. . . . The discovery of a hitherto unsuspected truth is just what may disrupt a hitherto intelligible account” (MacIntyre, 455).
In Hamlet’s case, the discovery of his father’s murder through the revelations of his father’s ghost disrupts his understanding of past events. I had lived happily as an evangelical Episcopalian Christian for several years without thinking too much about how I was able to trust the Bible (my “hitherto intelligible account”), but when I learned that the Church existed for many generations before the canon of Scripture was authoritatively compiled (the “unsuspected truth”), it was time to rewrite the narrative.
How can the Protestant traditions accept Scripture as the inspired word of God if they reject the authority structure that recognized them as such in the first place? This was the disruption, the epistemological crisis, and I found that the Catholic Church had the resources to resolve it.
Tradition with a capital “T”
The answer lies in the other authoritative “text” in the Catholic tradition: Tradition. This distinctive feature of Catholicism was first brought to my attention by an Evangelical youth pastor in Spain who, in response to my question about why his church did not cooperate with local Catholic parishes in outreach efforts, told me his church believed in only the Bible, whereas Catholic churches believed in the Bible and Tradition. (Surely such an episode demonstrates the need for better communication and understanding among Christian sub-traditions.)
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that Tradition is a “living transmission” of the gospel that is “accomplished in the Holy Spirit” (78). Jesus commissioned his apostles to preach the gospel to all the nations, and the Catholic Church maintains “the gospel was handed on in two ways”: orally and in writing. The gospel was passed down in writing in Scripture and “‘by the apostles who handed on, by the spoken word of their preaching, by the example they gave, by the institutions they established, what they themselves had received—whether from the lips of Christ, from his way of life and his works, or whether they had learned it at the prompting of the Holy Spirit’” (CCC 76, emphasis added).
Though this other authoritative “text” is not embodied in one book such as the Bible, part of it is expressed in such written forms as creeds, documents from councils, papal encyclicals, and infallible pronouncements. In fact, a characteristic of this “text” is that it is ongoing and living—a progressive revelation of the Father to His Son’s Spouse through the Holy Spirit (CCC 79). Some Protestants regard the Catholic belief that doctrine can be derived from Tradition with great suspicion, because they worry that the Catholic Church will change the basic content of the gospel as found in Scripture. (The Reformation is evidence that many thought the Church had corrupted the gospel.)
Yet Tradition is what ratifies Scripture as Scripture: “‘For Holy Mother Church, relying on the faith of the apostolic age, accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and the New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and have been handed on as such to the Church herself’” (CCC 105). If the Church is able to “rely on the faith of the apostolic age” as far as Scripture is concerned, why can it not rely on that faith in other matters, too?
My Protestant tradition could not answer these questions of authority, Tradition, and the Bible for me. But Catholic tradition could. According to MacIntyre, this realization would justify my conversion to the Catholic tradition. Now that I could see the question of Scripture’s trustworthiness from the Catholic perspective, I was able to perceive more readily the inconsistencies among the Protestant accounts. “When an epistemological crisis is resolved,” MacIntyre said, “it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them” (MacIntyre, 455).
The question of authority
Another problem I observed in my conservative Anglican tradition was the lack of a central authority. In 2003, the Episcopal Church in the United States consecrated Gene Robinson, a divorced, practicing homosexual, as bishop of New Hampshire. A radical, liberal minor contingency of North American Episcopalians acted in direct defiance of the decisions and desires of the worldwide Anglican Communion, yet because of the organization of that Communion, all the conservative prelates could do was stand by and express their dismay at the course of events. The tradition lacked the resources to respond in any tangible, disciplinary way to this internal crisis.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, possesses the hierarchical resources to discipline those of its leaders who directly disobey the teachings of the Church. In this situation, I again found reason to favor the Catholic tradition over the conservative Anglican one.
How has the Catholic Church fared when confronted with crises throughout history? Taking MacIntyre’s historical approach to epistemology, we can infer that the Catholic tradition was indeed in need of challenge and reform at the time of the Protestant Reformation: “Traditions at certain periods actually require and need revolutions for their continuance” (MacIntyre 147). In our analysis per MacIntyre of the rationality of the Catholic tradition, we need to examine how it fared after the challenges arose. If the Church had been unable to recover from the shock of such major schisms, we would be amiss in touting its rationality. But history presents quite the opposite picture.
Catholicism: survival of the fittest
The drastic actions of the Protestant reformers prompted the Catholic Church to confront the abuses present in its midst and to solidify its stance on many doctrinal issues. At the Council of Trent, Catholic leaders took steps to purge the Church of corruption and to make explicit many doctrines that had been implicitly believed and practiced. The subsequent efforts to win back Protestant defectors and to improve the education of the clergy reinvigorated the Catholic Church in Europe.
In describing the stages that traditions go through, MacIntyre observes that after a tradition has been challenged, it is “reformulated to meet these inadequacies . . . [and] some core of shared beliefs survives the reformulation” (Nancey Murphy, Reasoning and Rhetoric in Religion, 261-262). In the case of the Catholic Church, much more than just “some” of the “core” survived the Protestant attack. The remarkable continuity of the Catholic tradition over the centuries demonstrates that it is “capable of reformulation, in ways faithful to its origins, to answer new objections, account for new experiences, and so forth” (Reasoning, 262), and thus adherence to it is justified.
As for the Protestant traditions, after breaking away from the Catholic Church, they began breaking way from each other, a process that continues to today. History demonstrates time and again that it is impossible to maintain unity without a central authority, i.e., the pope. The Catholic Church can lovingly and clearly make sense of the endless divisions within non-Catholic Christian traditions.
Conclusion
Applying MacIntyre’s definition of traditions and his suggestions about how to judge between rival traditions helped clarify what I had been discovering about the superior consistency and coherency of the Catholic tradition compared to Protestant ones. If you make use of the concepts presented in this article in discussion with Protestant Christians, please remember to proceed with great charity, compassion, and respect for the dearly held faith of our Protestant brothers and sisters. We need to seek unity with each other to reach out together to a broken world in desperate need of Christ.
Nevertheless, when the time comes, we also need to argue persuasively for the Church that Christ founded, the only one that is divinely protected from error and thus blessed with internal consistency: the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
Mine was a conversion of the mind and a less definable conversion of the heart. God gave me the gift of faith in his Church. I prayed my first Hail Mary in my little apartment on the Fuller Theological Seminary campus, and I was received into the Catholic Church in 2004, a month before my Catholic marriage to Robert. Thirteen years of marriage and four sons later, we continue to grow together in our shared Faith.