An Unanticipated Destination

Since I recently joined the Roman Catholic Church, it seems appropriate to write out some thoughts about how I’ve gotten here. My journey into the ancient Church has been going on for some time; I’m not even sure when it began, except that my time at Temple University was, in many ways, the beginning. At that time I only opened the door to the possibility that Catholic thinking might be able to contribute something worthwhile in the area of ethics, but I also learned, from personal contact, that it is possible for Catholics to have a real and vibrant faith in Jesus Christ. Apart from this, most of my stereotypes about Catholicism (and Catholics) remained intact.

It was when I was on staff at Elizabethtown BIC Church that I began to realize there was more to Catholicism than I had been led to believe. First, there was J.I. Packer’s description of the Puritans as “Protestant Monastics,” which stirred my interest in monastic spirituality; then there was Eugene Peterson, who draws heavily on Catholic forms of spirituality and prayer. After reading Peterson, I started reading people who had influenced him (Martin Thornton, Thomas Merton, John Henry Newman, Henri Nouwen, etc.), which then suggested others, more than I can name off the top of my head. What began as an attempt at enlarging my prayer life began increasingly to seem like a journey into the ancient Church, either Orthodoxy or Catholicism.

For awhile I was drawn to Orthodoxy, and I am still very much influenced by Orthodox spirituality, especially in the Jesus Prayer and the use of icons. I have visited Orthodox worship services and have talked at length with an Orthodox priest (and also with friends who attend his church). But I had to conclude, in my case, that the destination of this journey is not Eastern Orthodoxy. Richard John Neuhaus’ words are consistent with my own thinking in this area:

“Eastern Orthodoxy is a real alternative for the ecclesial Christian. The churches of the East are recognized as ‘sister churches’ by Rome. Orthodoxy possesses so many of the essentials – apostolic ministry and doctrine, a magnificent richness of liturgy and sacramental life, a powerful theological tradition of humanity’s destined end in the life of God, a fervent devotion to Mary and the saints. One does have to consider Orthodoxy. But I am a Western Christian, with all that it entails. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on nature and grace, reason and revelation, sin and forgiveness, as well as the Reformation refractions of those great themes and the continuing disputes they have occasioned. Moreover, Orthodoxy is powerfully shaped by ethnic and national identities – Russian, Greek, Romanian, Armenian – to which am a stranger” (Catholic Matters, p. 68).

I also believe, in my case, that one attraction of Orthodoxy was that it provided a way to connect with the ancient Church without committing the unspeakable offense (for a Protestant) of swimming the Tiber. After all, the Protestant movement was protesting against Catholicism, not Orthodoxy, and most Protestants, even theologically-aware Protestants, are only vaguely aware of Orthodoxy.

So far I’ve been describing the process in more-or-less chronological order, but at this point it might be better to shift to a different mode. I’ll begin by listing some reasons why I can no longer see a future for myself in Protestantism and then, later, will describe some specific convictions about the Catholic Church. The difficulty I’m finding with writing all this out is that everything together points in the same direction, so that this is not only an intellectual/theological journey, although it is that. It is also a spiritual journey, and both dimensions have been feeding off each other; but the process began as a spiritual awakening to the riches of the historic Church.

1) The first difficulty for me, in reference to Protestantism, is that Protestantism understands itself (and represents itself) as a restorationist movement: Protestantism is an attempt to return the Church to what it was in the beginning, before all the additions of the medieval period. As I’ve become more acquainted with the early Church fathers, it has become apparent that this is simply not true: Protestantism is a new thing, which is why Protestants tend to look at Church History and Theology through the lens of the Reformation. Protestant thinking, typically, skips over the entire period from the end of the New Testament until the Protestant Reformation (with a very selective appeal to St. Augustine and a few others). The discontinuity is not between the New Testament and the Medieval Church, but between the Church of the early centuries and the churches of the Reformation (recognizing, as the Catholic Church acknowledges, that there was a need for reform in the late Medieval Church)

2) This leads to the problem of denominationalism: Protestants, and especially Evangelical Protestants, think of the Catholic Church as simply one denomination among others. A more accurate picture is to describe denominations as a Protestant phenomenon, so on one side is the Catholic Church and on the other side is a multitude of Protestant denominations and sects. There is no Protestant Church which one can set alongside the Catholic Church for comparison; there is, rather, a Protestant movement, rooted in a schism of the 16th century and with certain common ideas but no tangible sense of internal cohesion.

But if Protestantism was truly a reform movement in the One Church, why couldn’t it survive even one generation as a single, identifiable body? And now, over 500 years later, why is there such a vast number (somewhere in the tens of thousands) of different bodies that have no interest in the restoration of visible unity? Appeal is frequently made to the idea of the invisible Church, and Protestants I speak with often are satisfied with the idea that there is an invisible unity among those who truly belong to Jesus, which makes visible unity unnecessary. But in His High Priestly prayer, Jesus prays for His disciples to be one, “so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” This is clearly pointing to something more than an invisible connection between true believers in various bodies that will have nothing to do with one another. Jesus is praying for a visible unity that convinces the world of the truth of the gospel. Is Protestantism capable of visible unity? It seems unlikely, given the consistent pattern of fractiousness from the 16th century until now.

3) I increasingly see the Reformation solas as departures from, rather than a return to, the early Church. One looks in vain, in the early Fathers, for teaching so support justification by faith alone. The New Testament teaches justification by faith, indeed, but there is a consistent pattern of tying faith to actions by incarnating the life of Christ in His disciples. Sola Fides loses sight of this synergistic relationship between faith and good works, which is why Martin Luther had so much trouble with the Epistle of St. James (and why many Lutheran scholars continue to see a conflict between James and the apostle Paul).

Sola Scriptura is even less defensible, especially as it is commonly understood and taught. I was taught in classes at an Evangelical college that the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism is a conflict over authority: the Catholic Church believes in Scripture + Tradition while Protestants believe in the authority of Scripture alone. In actual practice in present-day American Evangelical Protestantism, authority resides not in Scripture, but in the individual interpreter of Scripture (I decide which church to attend based on whether or not it fits my understanding). This tendency becomes more and more pronounced as Scripture is removed from its place in corporate worship in the interest of not offending seekers. But even in more theologically-oriented churches, Scripture is not understood in a vacuum, but is read from within the perspective, or tradition, of that particular group.

Then there is the troubling fact that Paul refers to the Church, not Scripture, as the “pillar and foundation of truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). Protestants, of necessity, have to ask, “which Church?” If it’s the early Church, even the Church of the first five centuries (roughly covering the period of discernment about the Canon of Scripture), Protestants are in trouble, because even at this early period the Church was embracing things that Protestants find repugnant (monasticism, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, invoking the saints, and devotion to Mary as the Theotokos – or “birth giver of God”).

Even confining this idea to the Church of the Apostolic Fathers is problematic for Protestants, because in reading these very early writers one asks “which church in existence today is in continuity with these writers, many of whom were being martyred for their faith?” John Henry Newman effectively demonstrates the continuity between the early Church and the Roman Catholic Church of the 19th century: As the Church continues to reflect on Scripture, according to Newman, the riches that were lodged in the revelation from the beginning unfold over time: “the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation” (An Essay on the Development of Doctrine, pp. 29-30). It’s a daunting task to find this kind of continuity between the early Fathers and the churches of the Reformation; the usual approach is to confine one’s perspective to the New Testament understood within the context of Reformation Christianity. In this way, it becomes clear that the conflict of authority is not about the validity of Tradition but a conflict over which tradition is authoritative: the Apostolic Tradition received by the early Church Fathers and the successors to the apostles or the Reformation Tradition, received from the Reformers of the 16th Century in their attempts to address the excesses of the late medieval Catholic Church.

On the positive side, I’ve consistently found Catholicism to be more and have increasingly found the spiritual and intellectual world of Protestantism to be less. I believe that was the intention behind Thomas Howard’s book, shortly before he became a Catholic, Evangelical is Not Enough. Evangelicalism has faithfully represented part of the gospel, but it is a reductionist movement that has stripped the historic Church of many of its riches. This realization began, for me, in the discovery of Catholic spirituality (the Liturgy of the Hours, Lectio Divina, the Rosary, Contemplative Prayer) and sacramentalism.

But encountering these things more than 20 years ago inevitably led into the area of theological reflection, and as I read Catholic works of theology I discovered two things that are important in this connection: 1) that most of what I had read about Catholic theology from Protestant writers was not true; and 2) that the Catholic explanations of Scripture were more consistent with the whole of Scripture (without the incurable denominational tendency to explain away inconvenient texts): things that I had always found puzzling – like the troubling connection in the New Testament between baptism and salvation, or the unavoidable Eucharistic emphasis in John 6 – began to make far more sense. At this point, to give myself to any one expression of Protestantism seems intolerably confining. There is more room, both intellectually and spiritually, in the Catholic Church. As Chesterton observed, “when he has entered the Church, [the convert] finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside” (The Catholic Church and Conversion).

I should probably add a few comments about Mary, since Catholic devotion to Mary is often the biggest stumbling block to Evangelicals. From an Evangelical Protestant perspective, on the outside looking in, it seems, of necessity, that any kind of Marian emphasis detracts from the preeminence of Jesus. But whether this is true is as much an empirical question as a theological one. Pope John Paul II worried about this early in his life, but he said he came to see that not only does Mary lead us to Jesus, Jesus also leads us to Mary. His experience was that in drawing nearer to Jesus he also came to a more exalted understanding of Mary. The usual evangelical assessment of John Paul is that he was an exceptionally godly man who, unfortunately, put too much emphasis on Mary. But what if, rather than an unfortunate and relatively inconsequential addition, his Marian emphasis was a necessary part of his extraordinary Christ-centeredness? The same things could also be said about Mother Theresa. The things I read in this area from Catholic writers emphasize that Mary always points beyond herself to Jesus, so that in drawing near to her (in the communion of saints) we necessarily are drawn to exalt Jesus more (because Mary is the ultimate model of self-emptying discipleship).

I've found this quote by Tom Howard helpful: "A parsimonious notion of God's glory has been one result of the revulsion felt by so many over the [sometimes excessive] honor paid to Mary, as though to say, If God alone is all-glorious, then no one else is glorious at all. No exaltation may be admitted for any other creature, since this would endanger the exclusive prerogative of God. But this is to imagine a paltry court. What king surrounds himself with warped, dwarfish, worthless creatures? The more glorious the king, the more glorious are the titles and honors he bestows" (Evangelical is Not Enough, p. 87). Think of how exalted the eldil are in Perelandra (by C.S. Lewis), and yet they are only creatures. To see Mary as now having been highly exalted (honoring the promise, "those who humble themselves will be exalted”) in the end should lead to a more exalted understanding of God (as long as we follow through in our thinking and don't stop at Mary herself; there's a good reason why Orthodox icons never present Mary alone, but always have her with Jesus).

More needs to be said before I end about the less tangible dimension of this journey, and I’ve saved this till last because I find it easier to talk about ideas. I have felt almost irresistibly drawn to the Catholic Church in ways that I am unable to fully explain; I even tried to live as a Catholic for 15 years without entering the Catholic Church, but it’s now clear that I’m unable to escape the longing to be received into full communion in the Church of the Apostles, the Church “most fully and rightly ordered through time” (Richard John Neuhaus). This all started as an attempt to deepen and enrich my prayer life, but it has ended up leading me in a direction I never sought or anticipated. I suppose the best explanation I’ve found for this is from Richard Neuhaus: “all the grace and truth to be found outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church gravitate toward unity with the Catholic Church” (Catholic Matters, p. 106).