My Journey Home

The above is given as a backdrop for my own spiritual development. The general atomsphere of my home life growing up was one of rigorous and unquestioning submission to the Lord. In all of this, the basic Protestant doctrines of sola fides and sola scriptura (I didn't know they were called that) were the overriding themes. Moreover, my father had a particular loathing for all things Catholic. I can recall numerous occasions where I was told that Catholics were going to Hell. At one point my dad said that the only way a Catholic could be saved is by abrogating their Cathlolicity. Ironically, however, my dad served as a sort of Pope of our house. To disagree with his views on the Bible was to fall into heresy. As the oldest child (and the one who clashed with my father the most) this fact was drilled into me. So much so that I myself actually felt less Christian when I did disagree with him.

In any event, my entire youth I simply desired to serve God. My earliest career goal that I can remember was to be a pastor. When I was five years old (according to my mother) I was quoting Scripture to adults, rebuking them for their misdeeds! Before I was a teenager I had read through the entire Scripture cover to cover (or so I thought). My devotion to God was accentuated by Christian schooling through the sixth grade, and then being home-schooled thereafter. Basically, my youth was spent as a Bible thumper, a label I was more than happy to sport.

In spite of all this, I was not an automaton. I was consistently an "A" student and an unconventional thinker at that. My parents would tell you that I was born to be an attorney. I am as contrarian as they come, and alway have been. This combination of intellectual curiosity and ability had always gotten me into trouble with my dad. His belief was that critical thinking was gussied up rebellion and a strong education was nothing more than sinful pride. Thus, as I got ready to go away to college, things worsened between my dad and I. And as the taste of independence grew strong, I began to care less just what he thought.

When I left for college half way across the country at age 17, I left my pursuit of God behind, though not my belief in Him. I simply wanted to do things my way. After my first year in college, I had spent half the time being drunk and the other half of the time reveling in my first live-in relationship with a woman. The latter, however, turned out for the best. I married that woman when I was 18 at the end of our freshman year in college. We promptly trasferred colleges for our sophomore year, and I quickly transferred my life back to a pursuit of Godliness. We began having children immediately. Within two years we had found a comfortable church home (our first) at a small Lutheran congregation. By the end of our undergrad days, my wife, who had grown up without any exposure to Christianity, had given her life to the Lord. Shortly after the birth of our fourth child my wife was baptized by my father (though she had been baptized Episcopalian as a baby). Everything seemed hunky dory, and we were all very devoted to Jesus.

Enter law school. When college was over, we all moved off to another college campus where I was to attend law school. We began attending a large Evangelical Free church (a step down the Protestant ladder) of roughly 2000 people. Many of my law school friends attended there, and we collectively started up a men's Bible study for law students that met in my home. My wife and I began teaching Sunday school at church, and my wife and kids started participating in the AWANA program. In short, my law school experience started off as a time where my family as a whole was closer to the Lord than we had ever been.

However, law school was also the place where I met a man that defied my Christian knowledge to that time. Lee was a year ahead of me, and we shared many common interests. Lee was a newlywed; conservative, politically active, very intellectual, and devoted to God. But he was a Catholic. Worse, he was a Catholic who actually understood his faith. Now remember that Catholics were the enemy; they were no different than pagans and in need of being converted to Christianity. In point of fact, converting a Catholic was really no different a process than converting any other wrong-headed pagan. We used to joke in my Bible study that if you asked a Catholic to open their Bible to the book of Matthew, they would stare at you dumbfounded. If you told them it was the first book in the New Testament, the look would remain frozen on their heathen faces. As for salvation, the response of every Catholic I had met when asked about their eternal destination was almost always, "Well I'm a good person and I go to church..." And Catholics who had converted to Protestantism were a dime a dozen; they were all over the place. (I had never even heard of, much less met, any Protestant who had converted to Catholicism; Protestantism was obviously the true Christianity). With that in mind, I told Lee right off that in his present state, he was bound for Hell, but that if he put his hope in Jesus Christ, he would be saved. (He has since told me that this was the greatest affront to his faith that he had ever endured; evidently I was the first gung-ho Protestant he had met.)

It wasn't long before me and Lee were engaging in regular debates over the Christian faith. I attacked him from every ground; and I knew so many of them to attack from: Mary, purgatory, the saints, salvation through works, rejection of the Bible, calling priests "father", Pharisaic rules, "mortal" and "venial" sins, icons and relics, the papacy, etc. It was all fair game. And to my credit, I had him on his heels more times than I can remember. But Lee was not one to be knocked down. Every time he would make a temporary retreat and come back with ammunition that took me aback. Most shockingly, half of the time his evidence came directly from Scripture. Now here was something new: a Catholic using my Book! The Book that they were supposed to hate. But it became a routine--I would confront him and force him to research his position; then he would do the same to me and I would have to research my position. It is certain that the two of us did more theological study during that period of time (which lasted for more than a year) than we did legal studies. In fact, by the end of Lee's final year in law school, the two of us would frequently engage one another in the lobby of our law library for three hours or more. If we had a class during such debates, the class would be skipped. We became somewhat infamous as the Protestant and Catholic who liked nothing better than to debate religion as busy fellow students looked on with an admixture of bewilderment and annoyance.

In all of this going back and forth, my own perspective grew more than I had realized. My experiences, both from childhood and as a Christian adult, had been almost universally individualistic. My worldview could be summed up with a variation of DesCartes' formulation "Je pense, donc je suis!" (I think, therefore I am.) For me, and I daresay for my father, it had always been "I feel God, therefore God is real." Now of course there is a kernel of truth in this perspective, but for me it had been the summa of my existence. In other words, the reality of God, to some extent, depended on my relationship to Him, and to the exclusion of all other indicia of God. Basically, I was wholly wrapped up in the idea of a “personal relationship” with Jesus as being the fullness of my own purpose and God’s purpose in the world. While it may have occurred to me that other people outside of my family also experienced God, it did not much matter to me. The idea that people who lived 100, 1000, or 10,000 years before had also had relationships to God seemed almost irrelevant. At best, such personalities (by which, of course, I strictly mean personalities appearing in the Bible) were guideposts by which my own relationship with God would be measured. But as I was forced to defend my own positions, particularly on the Bible itself, I was forced to see those who had come before me as real people. I was forced to understand them, their surroundings, their circumstances, and most of all their relationship to God. And this not simply for my own selfish purposes, but rather because I was beginning to recognize that everything my faith was built on (including the Bible) had been handed down to me by these people, whether I saw it or not. And, in fact, at the time I did not see it. I was too consumed with the excitement of discovering a church history that, for all intents and purposes, I did not know had existed.

When Lee finally graduated, neither of us had shifted from our firmly entrenched positions; rather, we had each just become more sophisticated in defending them. But we left each other with mutual challenges. Lee challenged me to read the early Church fathers, and I promised to do so out of respect for Lee and for our friendship. I in turn challenged him to read the entirety of the Scriptures, which he promised to do. After a few months apart, we began e-mailing one another, and so our debates continue via electronic media. At some point during that time, however, Lee switched tactics.

Having grown tired of endless debates over various doctrinal issues, Lee had come to realize that our difference was really one of first principles. My first principle was that the Bible was the sole rule of faith, and that my own interpretation of the Bible, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, was the path to truth. Lee's first principle was that the God's Word was the sole rule of faith, and that the Word was delivered to the Church, both in the form of Scripture and in the teachings of the successors to the apostles. Thus, Lee's path to the truth was not his own understanding of God, but rather the Church's understanding of God. This really highlighted some of the most crucial differences between Catholicism and Protestantism: community vs. individualism; Church vs. Bible; heirarchy vs. democracy (or anarchy); etc. The change in focus was a masterful stroke on Lee's part. It forced me to examine the very foundation of my beliefs, and though it took me a while to admit it, that foundation was not in great shape.

At the same time, Lee began sending me things. First, a subscription to First Things magazine (a phenomenal conservative monthly on religion in society), whose insightful articles were more often written by Catholics than Protestants. Then he sent apologetic works from authors like Scott Hahn, David Currie, Stephen Ray, etc. I was not particularly impressed. I could use all of my arguments against Lee to effectively counter these new pagans. I found Currie's book, "Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic" particularly distasteful. As I read his story of going straight from the Protestant ministry to becoming a Catholic it nearly made me sick. I didn't even know such a thing was possible. It was like watching somebody intentionally choose Hell; it gave me that empty feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. Yet, in hindsight, I think a little of that sickness came from the terror that this might someday happen to me. Occasionally Lee and I would write to each other on these issues, but starting a little over two years ago, our conversations had waned a bit due to some family problems.

My father and mother had split up due to some very unfortunate circumstances. For me, it was both devastating and liberating. Not so much the break-up, but my father's failures that led to the break-up. Devastating because, despite all of his flaws, I idolized the man. Yes, I had often hated him, but I had also desired to become like him in many ways. It was he that had led me to Christ, he that had taught me God's laws, and he that had so brilliantly instilled a love for the Lord into my heart and my life. Even now I can only hope to do half the job he did in preparing his children for a life of service to the King. But his failures left me stranded--without a hero. Moreover, I loved my dad and to see his pain and the course hid life had taken was demoralizing. I sympathized with him and cared for him. Yet at the same time there was a certain sense of liberation. For the first time in my life, I was free to be a man. Getting married did not give me that freedom. Nor did the birth of my four children, leading my family in a Christian walk, or obtaining undergraduate and graduate degrees. But when my father fell from grace, there was nobody there holding me up. No man whose word I could turn to and find some level of infallibility. For the first time in my life the discernment of God's will was on my shoulders, not my dad's. It was exhilirating; it was absolutely terrifying. For those who had a different kind of relationship with their parent, this will almost certainly smack of melodrama. But trust me when I say that such was the impact of seeing the fullness of my own father's humanity. In any event, it unshackled my Christian walk from my dad's and opened the door to future changes that would not likely have been possible otherwise.

A few months afterward, things had settled down a bit, and Lee and I began e-mailing again. It was about that time that I moved away from law school to take a job as an attorney. But almost immediately thereafter, our communication became sporadic and lacked the fire that it once had. I did not understand why until a year and a half later, and I will return to this point at the end of the article. In the meantime, my family and I moved into a community where both my younger brother and my father lived. My brother, following in dad's footsteps, was a youth pastor at a local Calvary Chapel (mildly Pentecostal and yet another rung down on the Protestant ladder), and my dad was attending church there on a regular basis (the first time in probably 15-20 years). Naturally, my family and I began attending there as well. My wife and I both dutifully signed up to teach Sunday School and AWANA and enrolled our children in those programs. Due to the fact that both programs took place on Sunday, we found it too difficult to attend service. Thus, we only attended on the first Sunday of the month, which was when communion was served. On the up side, we got involved in a weekly Bible study that met right across the street from our house. It was an eclectic mix of people from different denominations, but all of them loved Jesus (and were Protestant). As for attending church service only once a month, we weren't all that disappointed because at the time the pastor was doing a series on the Book of Revelation--22 weeks of it chapter by chapter! He was simply enamored with the topic of the pre-tribulation rapture, and every service, no matter which chapter he was on (remember, we only attended once a month), he made sure to insist that there would be a pre-tribulation rapture. We couldn't help but wonder if there was anything in Revelation that actually just might impact our daily lives.

When the summer rolled around, we got a break from both of our teaching programs and started attending Sunday service regularly. But by the end of the summer, my wife and I were talking seriously about switching churches. As luck would have it, the pastor grew up in a Catholic home and was a veteran Catholic basher. Every Sunday would come another snide remark about Catholicism, followed up with his signature line, "It's not about religion, it's about a relationship." How exactly he managed to fit this line into every sermon (by this time, we were going through the book of Acts chapter by chapter) still remains a mystery to me. But the derogatory nature of it all just rubbed me the wrong way. This was rather strange, because I was still steeped in my own opposition to Catholicism. But all of that was about to change.

At the end of the summer and through the fall, several momentous things happened that completely eroded my resistance to the Catholic faith. First came word of the Episcopalian problem. That church on the highest rung of the Protestant ladder had appointed Gene Robinson, a divorced man in an active homosexual relationship, as bishop over its flock. I didn't know much about Episcopalians, but this affected me deeply and I didn't know why. Second, in September my family and I did some traveling and spent a short time with Lee and his family. Being with them, attending Mass (which left us feeling so much more whole than our church service), and discussing all things of God, completely and finally erased in my mind the sense that Catholics were per se on bad terms with God (it really took that long!). Then in October, my wife and I showed up to Church on the first Sunday (we were back to our teaching positions) for communion, where we received the startling news that our church elders had unilaterally and without notice decided to permanently cancel communion. Apparently, they felt it was becoming too "ritualistic". But they consoled us that we could take communion in Bible studies that met in the homes if we wanted. And, they would even leave some grape juice and crackers at the back of the church on Sundays in case anyone wanted to take some. My wife and I were incredulous, but again we were not exactly sure why. Regardless, that was the last straw. (It is only fair to mention that the elders reversed themselves and never carried out their plan; but by that time, my wife and I knew that even such a proposal showed some very key problems.) The next Sunday we attended church at a large Lutheran congregation, and things felt much more "right"... But within a few weeks, "more right" was no longer good enough.

In November, Lee's wife started e-mailing me at work. After a few days, we had gotten into some pretty deep conversations about the differences between Protestants and Catholics. And what it all boiled down to was this: I was complaining that there were so many bad Catholics. She acknowledged how true this was. I complained that so many Catholics don't even know what salvation means. She acknowledged how true this was. I complained that hordes of Catholic priests were probably on their way to Hell. She acknowledged how true this was. And silently, I agonized over why the "truths" of the Episcopalians, Calvary Chapels, every Protestant denomination in between, and even the beliefs of my own father looked so different from the Bible, from one another, and even from the "truths" that they once proclaimed in the distant fogs of the past. And she graciously acknowledged how true this was. She also graciously pointed out that in spite of all the terrible things in the one true Church, Her teachings had not changed. Not for the last 10 years. Not for the last 100 years. Not since the Protestant Reformation. Not ever. And having done the research myself over the previous four years, I acknowledged how true this was. And looking at all of my experiences and all of the Protestant world around me, I knew that such consistency could be nothing other than a pure, unadulterated miracle. An act of God through His Holy Spirit, keeping pure the spotless Bride of the Lamb in preparation for that wedding feast.

During Thanksgiving, a couple of weeks later, I took my December edition of First Things down to my mom's house. When I had some free time, I began reading the articles. Midway through I happened upon an article written by Alicia Chesser, Coincidence & Conversion. It was her story of reconciliation to the Catholic Church after growing up in a Pentecostal home. It was a unique and personal encounter; it was her story. Yet in many ways, I felt like I was reading my story, and it made me cry. I cried because of what this would mean for me and my family. I cried for how we would be treated by our Protestant brothers and sisters. I cried for what it would do to my parents and siblings. And I cried for having missed the Truth all along. But mostly I cried because I had at last discovered that the story of God's work in the world is not just the story of me and my immediate family, but the story of all God's people, a community, the collective and unitary Body and Bride of Jesus Christ. And the true unity of that Body was precisely why Chesser's story was just as much my story.

My wife readily accepted the concept of becoming Catholic, and we attended mass as soon as we got back from Thanksgiving. Privately I reflected on all of the intellectual prowess that had enabled me to see the Truth of Catholicism. Key to it all was the fact that nowhere did the Bible say that it (the Bible) was the sole rule of faith. In fact, the Bible says that Christ established a Church, Christ and Paul clearly taught that unity was an absolute essential (not an option), and Christ had clearly given his disciples special authority that was exercised in a doctrinal role at the first council in Jerusalem. But beyond all of that, the Bible itself was an amalgam of books written by various persons at different times, and at no point did God personally appear and write in the sky that 27 specific books should be included in the New Testament. As a matter of historical fact, I had to acknowledge that the historic Church in the late 4th century had compiled the Bible and officially declared what was (and was not) Scripture. So, either I accepted that God was speaking to and through His Church outside the Bible (i.e. telling them what books made up the Bible), or I had to reject the Bible itself. I chose the former. It was really sheer logic (with a little genius mixed in!).

A couple of weeks later I was chatting with Lee and he dealt a swift but well-deserved blow to my ego. He said, "Dave, about a year and half ago I got really upset with something you wrote, and I can't remember what it was. But I remember thinking, 'Wow! This guy is really dense. He just doesn't get it.' That was when we stopped debating. I just felt like you had exhausted your logical limits and were throwing out non-sensical arguments. I didn't know what to do, so my family and I began to pray for you every night. We just prayed that the Holy Spirit would change your heart and your mind." What a crushing thought. I really hadn't done anything at all. In fact, I had been a complete moron. Instead, the Holy Spirit had used my own personal experiences, the events in my community, and national events to ease me into a place where I could accept Catholicism for what it really offered: the teaching authority given by Jesus Christ Himself. I had been led down a path, a journey of discovering the ultimate end of Protestanism and the adoption of personal Bible interpretation as the rule of faith. And the end of that journey was confusion, chaos, degradation of doctrine, and finally heresy—in short, the “Abolition of Christianity” to co-opt a C.S. Lewis phrase. And then, before despair could set in, the Spirit used His servants to show me the alternative. Not one of perfect people. Not one of perfect priests. But one of unchanging and infallible Truth, and all hidden in the same place it had been for 2000 years. The Body and Bride of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Church. It's been only four months now, but already I can say without hesitation, it is so good to be home.

In Christ,
Dave