How I Was Stunned By Scripture | John Bergsma

He was dressed like Darth Vader. He's walking towards me, you know, with the Imperial March going on and he's saying, you know, John, I am your father. I'm like, no, no, this cannot be happening. I I don't want to become Catholic. And you have to understand, the Catholic Church is the only religious organization I know where people convert kicking and screaming. We're like, they don't want to convert, but they feel like they have to. It's like, I don't want to do this, but confirm me anyway, you know, because of the truth of [Music] it.

Hi, this is Dr. John Bergsma from the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and I have wonderful news to announce to you and that is we are starting the Stunned by Scripture Show right here in our studios at the St. Paul Center in Stevenville, Ohio. The stun by scripture show is going to be my personal uh video series where we are going to engage some of the things that I am very passionate about which is first of all scripture thus the name of the show but related issues like how to apply scripture to our daily lives. We're going to have interviews with various Bible scholars who are friends and colleagues of mine. We'll probably get into some other issues as well, like things that come up when you try to engage the Old Testament, like creation. Why be Catholic when there's so many other versions of Christianity out there and available? We'll get into biblical apologetics. So, it's going to be a rich cornucopia of topics, issues, and matters all concerned with the scripture. So, please check us out at the St. Paul Center website and uh become a regular viewer and participant in the Stunned by Scripture show.

Today I'd like to share with you the story of my journey into the Catholic faith. And it's pretty ironic that I'm here doing this because 30 years ago, if you had told me that I would ever be giving testimony to the truth of the Catholic Church or the truth of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist, I would have thought you were crazy and I would have been personally horrified because I come from a Dutch Calvinist tradition. That's a pretty niche Protestant group. I'm sure not many of you have heard of Dutch Calvinism, but uh most of you have probably heard of Presbyterians. So, what I want you to do is just think of Presbyterians with wooden shoes and windmill cookies. And that pretty much gives you an idea of my cultural and religious background. But within Dutch Calvinism, we had many theological statements. And to get ahead of myself a little bit, I'm going to talk about when I was a pastor in that group. But to be a pastor in that uh movement, I had to sign a form affirming many different theological statements, including one that said that the mass, the Catholic mass at bottom was nothing other than a denial of the one sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross and therefore a condemnable idolatry. That's right. I come from a background where the holy sacrifice of the mass was referred to as a condemnable idolatry. Why, you might ask? Well, this is how he reasoned. In the mass, bread and wine were worshiped as if they were God. But of course, they aren't. They are creatures. So, when you worship the creature as if it was the creator, that is idolatry and therefore something to be condemned. And we did. So that's how far I've come.

Now what happened? You know what what is the nature of that journey? A little bit of context. My father was a US Navy chaplain and uh a great orator very much a gifted minister. And of course growing up in his household that made a strong impression on me and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. So, uh, when I graduated from high school, I went to our denominational, uh, college and seminary in Western Michigan and went through all the necessary preparation to be a pastor. I got married young and I began to pastor in the downtown area kind of as an urban missionary in order to support my young wife and my growing family. And that's really where I'd like to begin my story of my journey into the church because it was doing the practice of Protestant ministry that began to push me toward Rome. And you might think, well, that's ironic. Why would actually being a Protestant pastor push you toward the Roman Catholic Church? Well, this is the issue. As long as you are a pew sitter, you can allow many theological issues to just kind of remain on the shelf and you don't have to confront them, grapple with them, or really wrestle with them. But when you're a pastor and on a daily basis, you're preaching, teaching, catechizing, discipling, evangelizing, you cannot avoid difficult theological issues. You have to confront them because they are in your face on a daily basis. And that's what I experienced when I began actually doing the work of a Protestant pastor. I had to confront some of the weaknesses of Protestant theology.

Now, you may be aware that Protestantism is extremely diverse. Correct? I mean, after all, we have Lutheran, we've got Calvinists, we've got Presbyterians, we've got Methodists, we've got Baptists of many different sorts, we have Pentecostals, Charismatics, Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarene, on and on and on. So a great deal of variety and what holds them all together basically are five slogans that come down to us from the reformation period and these five slogans all begin sola in Latin and that means only in English. So they are uh slogans like this solar graatia which means only uh by grace or ones that you might be familiar with would be solar scriptura that means the Bible alone and solar feday which means uh by faith alone. So there's a total of five of these, but the the two that are real sticklers that really divide Protestants from Catholics are the Bible alone, solos scriptura, and faith alone or solid. And the other three actually uh we can accommodate and they they don't necessarily need to divide Catholics from Protestants, but those two are the sticking issue sticking issues perhaps I should say. And so I want to tackle those and explain how in the practice of Protestant ministry I really had to confront those two doctrines or those two slogans in particular.

So let's start with solid. This is the idea that it is only by faith that you are saved and that your works don't count. Jesus just looks at the faith that you have in your heart and that's the sole determining factor of whether or not you get into heaven. Now I'm simplifying a little bit. There's endless variations on how to understand solid, but that's the way many people imagine it. So let me tell you a little story. When I was a young pastor, I wanted to learn how to evangelize because I had grown up in the church. My own dad was a preacher. I had heard countless sermons over the years urging me to go out and preach the gospel. And yet hardly any pastor or preacher shared with me what exactly that looked like or how I was supposed to do that. So I can remember sitting in the pew in sixth grade and hearing yet another sermon on how I needed to go out and share the gospel. And I'm trying to imagine myself, what does that look like? Do I stand up on my desk in Mrs. ender sixth grade English class and say, "Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand." Or what? I just did not see that going over very well at Harbor Elementary School uh where I was attending or any of the other public schools where I was going to. So, what exactly did it look like to preach the gospel? Here I was uh in my mid20s and I still didn't know exactly what that looked like. So, I found an older pastor who actually went doortodoor in the downtown area making cold calls and sharing the gospel. Very few people did that, but I found this older gentleman who did. And I apprenticed myself to him. I said, "Please take me out. Take me door todoor. Show me how you just share the gospel with somebody off the street, as it were." So, he began to take me out uh once a week. I think it was on Wednesdays. We'd go in the afternoon, knock on doors, and uh share the good news. We used a method called the Roman road, which some of you viewing this might be familiar with. It's basically six verses from the Epistle to the Romans taken out of context and rearranged in such a way as to teach Protestant sotiology, which is the doctrine of salvation in in in the Protestant movement. Uh so anyway, so I I memorized these five or six verses from uh Romans and I went out with my trainer with my mentor who was going to show me how to share the gospel.

About 3 weeks into this whole experience, we knocked on the door of a middle-aged woman uh one afternoon. She had visited the church recently, so we had something of a connection there. She invited us to her upstairs apartment in the uh downtown neighborhood where we ministered and she was very open and uh my mentor asked her if she would like to learn more about Jesus, she said she would and he began to present the Roman road to her and interestingly after sharing you know Romans 3:23 the wages of sin is death and Romans 6:23 the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord etc. and uh so on. Our closer verse though was not for Romans. Our closer verse was always Revelation 3:20. And you may be familiar with that one. It goes, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will go in and eat with him and he with me." So when we would wrap up our gospel presentation, we would usually recite that verse and then ask the person, "Do you hear Jesus knocking on the door of your heart?" And if they said yes, we would say, "Would you like to invite him in?" And if they said yes again, then we would lead them in what we called the sinner's prayer, which was a prayer to invite Jesus into their life. And let me make clear, there's nothing wrong with that. That's a good thing. I'm not criticizing that at all. As a Catholic, uh, looking back upon it, I would liken that to what we call a spiritual communion. So they were having a a kind of a spiritual experience of Jesus or at least inviting him to uh commune with them in their soul. And again, nothing wrong with that. Uh that could be a big step forward in somebody's spiritual life to invite Jesus into their heart. And it should be followed up then with baptism and the other sacraments and catechizus and disciplehip etc to integrate them into the body of Christ.

In any event, on this particular day, my mentor asked uh the older woman, "Would you like to invite Jesus into your life?" And she said, "Yes." And at that, I kind of perked up because usually by this time, nine times out of 10, folks had found a reason to get us out of the house before we even got to this point. But here, uh, we're still in the house. And she said, "Yes." So, we've got a live one here. We're going to we're going to close a sale today. we're going to close a sale on the gospel. So, I perked up my ears, started to pay close attention now and to see how this was done. So, my mentor began to lead her in a prayer to receive Jesus into her heart, which she repeated after him. And when the prayer was over, there was this sense of peace in the room. And uh we kind of looked at each other and smiled. This sense that this woman had made a big step forward in her journey uh with God. At that point, brothers and sisters, things began to get a little strange because my trainer started to catechize her. And this is how he began. He said, "Okay, ma'am, now that you have prayed to receive Jesus as your savior, if you went out tomorrow and robbed a bank and ran off with all the money, would you still go to heaven?" And she said, [Music] "Uh, I mean, she didn't know where this is coming from." So he made it sharper and he said, "Yes, ma'am. And and if the week after you went downstairs and you you shot your downstairs tenant and ran off to Mexico, would you still go to heaven?" And she's thinking about this. She says, "Uh, no." And he says, "Yes, you would because once saved, always saved. And salvation is by faith alone." And you've made an act of faith in Jesus Christ as your savior. And now, since works don't count, nothing that you do can ever endanger your salvation. And I'm watching this going on. I'm watching pastor, lady, pastor, lady, pastor. And when he says that, I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute. I agree with the lady. I don't think that you could just pray to receive Jesus into your heart and go out and rob banks and shoot people and be assured that you're going to heaven. And but more importantly, it's not how I reacted kind of viscerally. More importantly is all of the scriptures that began to flood my mind when I heard him say that. The first thing that came to mind was Matthew 7:21. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my father in heaven. And then the next thing that came to mind was Luke 9:23. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. Neither of those verses or any other of many passages of scripture that came to mind sounded anything like, "Oh, I can just make an act of faith and then go and do what I want and commit egregious sins and and still be assured that I'm going to heaven."

Now, as you're listening to this, I'm sure there's Protestants watching this who are thinking themselves, "Well, I don't believe that. That's not what I mean by faith alone." And I understand that. And and I agree with you and that's not how I understood faith alone either. In fact, what was shocking about the whole experience was I had never heard anyone in my Protestant life teach salvation by faith alone in such a crass manner. And it kind of shocked me. I didn't even know that there were Protestants who held to that teaching in such a fashion. But I was later to discover that there were a lot. I don't think that they're a majority, but I went on to hear TV preachers and various theologians and so on actually defend a very uh blunt, again, I'll say it, a very crass presentation of salvation by faith alone. So, maybe you're listening to this and you're thinking, "Well, I don't believe it that way, you know." And maybe what you're thinking is, "No, by salvation by faith alone, we're talking about saving faith." And saving faith always manifests itself in good works. So it goes along and and and if you don't have the good works, then you don't have saving faith. And I would say to you, yes. And that's basically what I believed, too. But once you make those moves and you start redefining what faith is and you start having special definitions like saving faith that includes a manifestation in works, what you are doing at that point is moving towards the Catholic position. And so this experience began me on a personal journey. When I left that evangelism experience and and walked, you know, back to my car at the end of the afternoon and drove home, I couldn't help think about what I had just witnessed. And I was really struggling internally. What do I mean by salvation by faith alone? If I don't mean the blunt presentation that I witnessed my mentor deliver to this woman, what do I actually mean when I say those words saved by faith alone? And this started me on about a 4-year journey of investigating this doctrine. And I read many different Protestant authors. I read some Catholic authors. I even read a copy of the Catholic Catechism on justification and sanctification. And after four years of struggling with this, I came to a a conclusion. One of two things was the case. Either number one, salvation by faith alone is just wrong and unbiblical and clearly contrary to a n number of scriptures like Matthew 7:21, Luke 9:23, James 2:24, and others. So that's one possibility. It's just wrong. Or the other possibility is by the time you nuance it and adjust it and redefine it and qualify it in order to accommodate everything that scripture says, you end up backing yourself into the Catholic position via the kitchen door. Okay? In other words, you back your way into saying essentially the same thing that the Catholic Church does, but typically you say it in a backwards way rather than a frontwards way. So whereas a Catholic would say we're saved by faith expressing itself through works. You might say no, we're saved by faith alone, but if you're pressed, you'd say, well, but but what I mean is saving faith which necessarily manifests itself in works or something like that. And so after struggling with this issue for so many years, I came to the conclusion, look, this is a false dilemma. This is a fake fight. Okay? We end up saying the same things just in different ways. So that pillar of Protestantism fell for me. This was no longer a reason for me to be outside the Catholic Church.

Let's talk about another one of these pillars of Protestantism and that is solar scriptura or this idea that all you need is the Bible alone. You don't need tradition. You don't need a teaching authority which as Catholics we call the magisterium. You don't need the church fathers. Uh you don't need the church councils. It's just you and your Bible. That's all you need to be a Christian. That's all you need to do church. Uh no other authority is required. Okay. Now there's variations again here too on how the Bible alone or solos scripture is understood. I I can't get into the tall weeds of all those discussions but this is how it is understood in the minds of many protestants including myself back in my early 20s. So this is the issue with solos scriptura.

Let me go back to my pastoral context. Okay, so I was doing ministry in a downtown neighborhood of about 4,000 people. And at best, this neighborhood could have supported one healthy, fully functioning Christian church. But there wasn't just one healthy church in this neighborhood. There were at least six unhealthy, struggling, weak little Protestant congregations in this downtown neighborhood. There was my little struggling Dutch Calvinist church on one corner and two blocks down and one block up the hill, there was another Dutch Calvinist church that was also struggling and barely making ends meet. Did you know that there are different kinds of Dutch Calvinism? Oh yes, yes, there are dozens of Dutch reformed denominations. We used to joke that one Dutchman is a believer, two Dutchman is a church, three Dutchman is a schism. They were split into so many different groups. And so there were there were two different Dutch Calvinist congregations just in my little neighborhood. And a couple blocks down there was a charismatic storefront church. A couple more blocks and there was a Hispanic fellowship in the government housing community. And then up on the hill behind my church, there was a group that called themselves the All-American Baptist Church. And then the Pentecostals out in the suburbs would send in a bus on Sunday morning to whisk up people from my neighborhood to bring them out to the suburbs to do whatever it was that Pentecostals did in the suburbs on a Sunday morning and then bring them back in the afternoon. So you get the picture. And I'm probably forgetting about a few other congregations that were present there. But uh all of us present in this neighborhood of about 4,000. And on any given issue, we were all over the map in terms of interpretation. Take baptism. What age did you have to be in order to receive baptism? Did baptism actually do anything to you? Or was it merely an outward profession of your faith in Christ? Can you baptize infants? If you baptize adults, what kind of knowledge of their faith must they have before they can receive the waters of baptism? How do you perform baptism? Is it by sprinkling, by pouring, or by dunking? Who may perform it? Uh, somebody ordained or any Christian or something in between? On and on and on. Take the Lord's supper. We didn't even use the term Eucharist. We call it the Lord's supper. But there again, what's going on? How is Jesus present in that meal? Is it merely symbolic? Is uh the the bread and wine actually transformed into his body and blood? Almost nobody believed that. That's actually a Catholic position. But there is various modifying views of Christ's presence in the Lord's supper. Who is authorized to celebrate it? Uh any Christian, a deacon, an elder ordained pastor, how frequently using what kind of elements, leaven bread, unleavened bread, grape juice, wine, etc. all over the map. And I don't even want to get into marriage and divorce and sexual morality. We uh every one of us had different positions on all of those issues. And so you get the idea. Just an incredible diversity of views and all of us claiming the same Bible, all of us claiming the same scriptura.

Now, when I was young and naive, I felt that my fellow pastors, who I assumed were sincere at these different churches, I I figured that the reason why they differed from me in terms of some of these issues like baptism or Lord's Supper or marriage was that they must just have overlooked some verses of the Bible that I knew about. And so when we would get together in private conversation, I thought it would be helpful if I shared with my fellow pastors some of the verses that I felt that they had overlooked. So when I had an opportunity, for example, when we would have our annual gospel fest and we would try to get all the congregations in the neighborhood together and we would block off a street and have a, you know, a cookout uh chicken and ribs and kleslaw and potato salad and we'd have a preach off. You know, we build a platform and have a mic and one pre preacher after another would get up there and preach the gospel all day long. And when I wasn't preaching myself and I had a break and maybe Pastor Bob from the Baptist church had a break too, you know, I would sit there, we'd be eating our chicken and ribs. I would say, "Pastor Bob, you know, I hear that you only baptize adults in your congregation, but have you considered Matthew 19 where Jesus says, "Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them." And don't you think that the waters of baptism are the best way to bring little children to Jesus? And have you considered that Peter and Acts 2:38 in surrounding verses when he's preaching at Pentecost, he says that the promise is for you and for your children to the gathered crowds. And when we look in the book of Acts like in Acts chapter 16 when the Philippian jailer is baptized by uh Paul and Silas that um you know his whole household is baptized with him which would include his children as well. So, don't you think these verses point to the practice of infant baptism? And so, I'd share these verses, and guess what I discovered? Pastor Bob had his verses, too. And so, Pastor Bob would come right back at me, and he would say, "Yeah, John, but you know, Mark 16:16 says, "If you believe and are baptized, you will be saved." And how can a little baby believe? And you're talking about Peter preaching at Pentecost, but Peter says, "Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins." And again, how can a little baby repent? And talking about uh the book of Acts, well, in all the examples in Acts, at best, it's only implied that there were children in his household. How do you know that the Philippian jailer even had children? The only explicit baptisms that we have recorded in the book of Acts are of adults. So I shared my verses, he shared his verses, and it always came down to verses, verses, verses. And I want you to remember that because verses versus verses is how solos scriptura always degenerates. You quote your verses to support your position. Your interlocutor dialogue partner quotes his or her verses that supports their theological position. And that's as far as you can get. You lob verses at one another. And there's no arbiter. There's no judge. There's no authority. There's no Christian Supreme Court to which you can appeal. That is if you're a Protestant, there's no Supreme Court as it were that to which you can appeal to adjudicate the two positions that the two of you are arguing. So this is how these discussions always ended up. And I began to get discouraged.

Around this time, there was going on the promisekeepers movement. Um, some of you watching this may remember this back in the 90s. And the promisekeepers movement was a Christian men's movement that really emphasized accuminism or or gathering together across denominational boundaries. And in my city, they had a promisekeepers event that was aimed particularly at pastors. And they invited me. and they invited me also to give a reflection at this meeting on John 17, uh, which is Christ's high priestly prayer. Don't know if you're familiar with this passage, but if you've not read John 17 in a while, it's worth busting out your Bible and reading it. It is the longest prayer of Jesus recorded in scripture. That alone should make it valuable. But furthermore, in this prayer, Jesus makes a a large heavy emphasis on the unity of believers. And in fact, right in the middle of the prayer, Jesus prays to the father that all who believe on the word of the apostles may be one even as the father and the son are one in order that the world may know. So Jesus prays, "Father, make them one that the world may know that you sent me." And as I meditated on that verse, the linkage between unity and mission began to profoundly impact me. I'd never really seen this before that the two were linked that when the church gave a common and unified witness when they were one then that resulted in the world coming to know in other words the world being evangelized but conversely when the church was not unified and not one then the world would not come to know that Jesus the son had been sent by the father in other words they would not receive the gospel and I reflected on this verse and I began to get very sad because when I looked out at my community, I realized how ineffective we were in evangelism. And a lot of it I attributed to the fact that we just had no commonality on our different doctrines. We were preaching different versions of the gospel and evangelizing people into very different movements. We lacked that unity that Jesus prayed for in John 17. And this I found very disturbing. How could Jesus's prayer for unity not have been answered? How can the son pray and have it not be granted by the father? And furthermore, if Jesus prayed for unity, how did he expect us to maintain it? I realized by that point that you cannot have unity based on scripture alone. It just doesn't work because everybody has their own interpretation of the scripture. So if scripture cannot provide us for with unity, what did Jesus leave us in order to keep us together? That question began to nag at the back of my mind. What did Jesus leave us to keep us unified? And that would continue to nag until years later when I begin to get an answer in a very different context.

So this is the situation. I've been ministering for four years. And after this time, of doing the practice of Protestant preaching, catechizus, disciplehip, etc. I've come to the point where I am doubting two of the major pillars of Protestantism. I'm no longer convinced of salvation by faith alone. I'm no longer convinced of the Bible alone. But it's coming to be the time when I need to be ordained. I need to accept full ordination. Up until this point for my Catholic uh viewers, I was something equivalent to a transitional deacon. The technical term was that I was a lentiate. I had a license from the denomination to conduct religious services. So again, something like a transitional deacon and that had sufficed for the kind of ministry that I was doing. But now I needed to make a lifelong commitment to the group that I was in. something like making final vows that uh that was approaching as I wrapped up my seminary career. This was the issue though. I was beginning to get cold feet. I mean, I had been preparing for this for 11 years of undergraduate and graduate education. And that's pretty depressing when you've been preparing for something for 11 years and you get to the point and you don't know if you want to step across the threshold. Not only is it depressing, but it's disillusioning because I was like, Lord, where have you been through this whole process? At every point, I thought I was saying yes to you and you've led me to a dead end. I mean, like, where is God in all of this? And not only disillusioning, but it left me directionless because if I don't go ahead and be a pastor, what else am I going to do with myself? That's the only thing I'm trained to do for heaven's sake. My undergraduate degree was in classical Greek and Latin. Okay, that that prepares you for a career in food service unless you go into uh clerical ministry if once you you become ordained. The only reason to get such a degree is to read the Bible in the original languages. So here I am. I'm depressed, disillusioned, and directionless. And in my crisis, I did something rash that I have since discovered many depressed, disillusioned, and directionless people do. I applied to graduate school thinking as a good American that all I need is more education, right? It's the answer to everything. Just get more educated and your life's problems will go away. So, I thought I'll just go back and I'll get another degree and maybe, you know, the four or five years that it takes me to get the degree will allow me time to clear my head and I'll figure this out and I'll figure what Christian group I ought to belong to and I'll get my ducks in a row and then I'll be able to come back into ministry or wherever God calls me with a better sense of direction. So, I applied to 12 different graduate schools to do a doctorate in scripture because I love the Bible and I did well in languages. And who should get back to me with the biggest, fattest, juiciest fellowship offer and actually bring me down to campus and whine me and dine me like I was a football recruit, but the University of Notre Dame, Southbend, Indiana. That's right. They brought me down, offered me a great package. And you say, well, why were you even applying to a Catholic school? Well, first of all, it was the only Catholic school to which I applied. And I only applied there because they advertised themselves as having an ecumenical theology faculty. In fact, there was a Protestant teaching there in Old Testament that I wanted to study with. I thought this is a great deal. I'll go down there. I'll study with Protestants and I'll get paid by Catholics. What a sweet situation. It's like robbing the Egyptians. Okay, so this is a a fantastic deal by my estimation. And so I moved my family down to the campus of Notre Dame in uh Southbend, Indiana.

Unfortunately, the Lord had other intentions for me. And a lot of those intentions would ultimately be made known through one of the first men that I met on the campus of Notre Dame, a guy named Michael. Now, Michael blew my mind because he had three qualities that I never thought I would find in the same person. He was obviously full of the Holy Spirit and he was highly intelligent. And thirdly, he was Catholic. How you could get all three of those qualities in one person without creating some kind of antimatter reaction and an explosion and, you know, some kind of self-destruct. Okay? And let me under explain what I meant. I I'd met many Catholics in my life, and I I basically had two categories for Catholics. When I would meet a Catholic, I would always ask myself, why does this person stay in a false church? Now, I'd met some spiritfilled Catholics before who loved Jesus and and gave evidence of that love in their life. But most of these Catholics I met did not seem to me to be playing with a complete deck of cards. It did not seem like their elevator was going to the top floor. Now understand this is my preconversion anti-atholic bigoted self. Please don't send me emails saying that I'm so judgmental about you know Catholic charismatics or something like this. This is this is my ignorant benited you know all of that kind of opinion from back in the day. But again I met these spiritfilled Catholics was not impressed by their intelligence. So, I put them in this ignorant category and I said to myself, well, they stay in the false church because they're just ignorant. Um, on the other hand, I would occasionally meet uh intelligent Catholics, sophisticated Catholics, but at this time in American church history, most of these folks tended to be cynical. They did they did not like John Paul II, who was Pope at the time. He was too conservative for them. And they rarely went to mass. And if they did go to mass, it was to please their mom. And I I knew where what these people were like and where they were coming from. They were basically religiously indifferent. And they stayed, in my opinion, they stayed in a false church because they just were indifferent. So they went into my indifferent category. So I had my ignorant category and my indifferent category. But here was Michael. And Michael standing right in front of me. He's clearly not ignorant and he's clearly not indifferent. So I have no category for him. He is an inexplicable Catholic. He's an uncatategorizable Catholic. And what am I going to do with him? Well, I felt like Moses in the burning bush. It's like, why is this bush not consumed? Why why does he just burn up and and self-destruct? So, I I got together with Michael and I said, "Michael, you know, I'm honestly I'm just fascinated by you. You're clearly very knowledgeable about all things uh concerning the faith and you're passionate about the Lord, but I don't understand how anybody with your knowledge and your passion would stay in what's to me at least is so obviously uh a false uh and incorrect church. So, can we get together and talk theology?

Well, Michael said, "Oh, I'd love to." he said. So, we arranged to meet together on Wednesdays at the food court at the University of Notre Dame, which was called the huddle, uh because so many things at Notre Dame, of course, are named after football. So, we we uh got together and we would get our two Whopper juniors for two bucks, which was the deal of the day, and we would sit there and we would talk theology. Now when these sessions began, I started out by running against Michael all of the basic biblical pmics that I had found so effective when trying to evangelize, so to speak, ill-formed, poorly catechized and non-practicing Catholics that I would run into in the downtown area when I used to be a Protestant pastor. So lowhanging fruit like Matthew 23 says, "Call no one on earth father." you Catholics call your priests father, therefore you are a false church. So simple stuff like that. And when I would run these pmics against Michael, he did something that I felt was very unfair. He would respond with scripture. And that to me seemed to be against the rules, the rules of engagement. Like I don't know who wrote the rules, but that was definitely against them. Because to clarify the situation, I was the Protestant. He was the Catholic. I was supposed to cite scripture. He was supposed to quote the popes or something. But you can't cite scripture to support the Catholic faith. Nobody does that. Okay? You can't quote the Bible. That's like a misuse. That's that's an abuse of the scriptures to cite it in support of the Catholic faith. Who does this? But not only did he cite scripture, he carried a Bible around with him. I don't remember if he uh was in his pocket or in his backpack, which he carried around for devotional reading. And periodically in our conversations, this would come out and he would go all chapter and verse on me. Well, this is blowing my world into smitherines. This was blowing my mind. You know, are pigs flying? Is hell freezing over? Bible toteen Catholics. Okay, who ever heard of such a thing? So obviously the scripture quotations and the simple Bible pmics were not going to knock Michael over or even put him back a couple inches. He was ready for this kind of technique. And after a couple of months of sharing scriptures back and forth, it got back to just like it used to be with Pastor Bob the Baptist minister. Verses, verses, verses. I had my Calvinist verses. Michael had his Catholic verses and we were lobbing them at one another. Now granted, this impressed me. I never knew that they were Catholic verses. And after a couple months of discussion, I really grew to respect Michael and his ability to mount a scriptural defense of the Catholic Church. And frequently, not only would he be on defense and kind of parry my blows uh from scripture, but he would sometimes go on offense himself and hit me with things that I had never seen before.

One particular day, I remember uh him telling me, "Look, John, I've I've answered many of your biblical objections against the Catholic faith, but just to, you know, clarify the issue, we can't argue these matters simply on the Bible alone." And I said, "Well, why not?" And he said, 'Well, because as I I'm sure you've become aware, the Bible does not teach the Bible alone. I was like, sure it does. What do you mean? He says, 'Well, give me one verse that teaches solos scriptura. And I thought for a minute, and I went where everybody goes, which is 2 Timothy 3:16. I said, what about 2 Timothy 3:16? All scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching uh correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete uh ready for every good work. Okay, so I quoted that off and Michael said yes and amen. And a Catholic can get behind everything that's said in 2 Timothy 3:16 with uh gusto and a clear conscience. But nowhere in 2 Timothy 3:16 does it say that the Bible is all you need. And I got quiet and I looked at the verse myself and I realized, oh yeah, I I guess you're right. Uh it doesn't exactly say that. Maybe it implies it or something like that, but it doesn't say it. I at this point in my life, I'd say it doesn't even imply it, but regardless. And so Michael said, "Well, do you have any other verses?" And I was like, "No, that's that's the best one. It's it's all downhill from there.

Well, Michael said, "I've got a verse for you because ironically, not only does the Bible not teach the Bible alone or solos scriptura, but the Bible does teach that we should hold fast to tradition." And I said, "No, it doesn't. There's there's no place in the New Testament that talks about us holding to tradition." And Michael said, "Yes, there is." 2 Thessalonians 2:15, St. Paul says, "Stand firm then, brethren, and hold fast to the traditions you are taught by us, whether by word of mouth or by letter." And I said, "I've never heard that verse before." And I grabbed Michael's Bible and turned around. I'm reading it and sure enough, stand firm. Hold fast to the traditions that you are taught by us, whether by word of mouth or by letter. And I thought to myself, I've read the Bible through Genesis to Revelation at least six times in my life. And I never remember coming across this verse. So I went home that evening and I got out my own Bible, which was a New International Version, and I opened it up and I looked up 2 Thessalonians 2:15. And there I read something to the effect of stand firm and hold to the teachings that you are taught by us whether by word of mouth or by letter. And I thought, huh, that's interesting. That's why I can't remember a verse in the New Testament that has traditions because my version reads teachings. So I thought to myself, well, what is it really? And remember that classical languages major of mine. That's right. so I could read ancient Greek. So I got up my Greek New Testament, looked up the verse, and sure enough, the word was parodysis in Greek, which means tradition. It is the very same word that Jesus uses when criticizing the tradition of the Pharisees. But that is a human tradition and a false tradition. But now St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and in a couple other passages elsewhere as well. Two other passages in his epistles, he commends to the early Christians to hold fast to apostolic tradition. Tradition that was uh given first of all teachings that were given by Jesus to the apostles and then handed down by the apostles to the church and to subsequent generations. We call that apostolic tradition. And so sure enough, there's the word paroticus. So I was I was intrigued by this. I I thought to myself, well, how does my English New International Version translate this word in all the places that it occurs? And so I started looking through a concordance and finding all the instances of parasysis in the New Testament. And I discovered that wherever the Greek word tradition is used in a negative sense, my Protestant version translated it as tradition. So tradition is negative. But every time the word was used positively, like the three instances where St. Paul says to hold fast to tradition, my Protestant translation rendered the term teaching. Well, if you're raised on a Bible like that, you very naturally come to the conclusion that there is no positive role for tradition in the Christian life. But that is not true. There is a positive role. Not only the apostle Paul teaches it, but subsequently the early fathers and the later fathers and the later later fathers etc. the whole um you know uh body of early leaders of the church commend the fidelity to the tradition that has been handed on by the apostles.

Well, so at this point, Michael and I have been debating scripture for months, and it's gotten to the point where I really respect him, but uh you really can't close the sale based on scripture alone because of the difficulty of interpreting it without appeal to some interpretive authority to a tradition or a magisterium. And I had learned this from experience as a Protestant pastor as I explained to you. So after uh we kind of reached a stalemate arguing on scripture alone, Michael made a suggestion. He said, "John, why don't we read the earliest of the church fathers together and allow them to cast the deciding vote between our two positions?" The rationale being, would not the people who actually knew the apostles personally be in a better position to understand what the apostles meant in the New Testament writings than we would be in since we are 2,000 years later and, you know, 6 and a half thousand miles uh away from the places where Jesus and the apostles lived, preached, and ministered. And I thought to myself, "Yeah, that makes sense. Those who are closest in time and place to the apostles themselves would be in a better position than me, so far away so many years later, to understand uh the apostolic writings." So yeah, I so I was open to this. I was like, "Yeah, let's let's read these guys." So who do you have in mind? And so Michael said, "Well, have you ever heard of the apostolic fathers?" I said, "No, I've never heard of them." Clement of Rome, Ignatius Vaniac. No, not ringing a bell. Now, years later, I went back to my church history textbook that I used in seminary, and I found that these apostolic fathers were mentioned. They were given like half a column on a single page, but but no quotes of their writings. And we just touched on them and moved right along. And I was later to find out there's good reason why in the Protestant seminary we did not read these guys. But I went into this completely sincere and uh completely naive. I thought, okay, let's read Ignatius of Antioch. He was a disciple of the Apostle John. He's writing only 10 years after the death of the Apostle John. He's writing these letters of his in 106 AD. again 10 years after the death of John when he was arrested by the Roman authorities for being bishop of Antioch, you know, and they brought him by a cart to the west coast of Asia Minor and then across to the Italian peninsula and brought him to Rome and fed him to the lions. So,

He was a martyr. So, I'm thinking he's formed by the Apostle John. He gave up his life in martyrdom. So, he's going to give me the straight scoop. And I fully expected him to make my point because I could have passed a polygraph. I was convinced that the early church was Calvinist. Everybody knows the early church was Calvinist. And then 600 years, 800 years, maybe 1,200 years later, the evil pope of Rome messed everything up. That was my view of church history.

So, if we uh read these early fathers, they're going to give the straight scoop and and they're going to make my point uh against Michael who's trying to defend the Catholic faith. So, I got into reading the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. And if you've never read them, I highly recommend getting an addition and using them for spiritual reading for uh whatever season is coming up, whether it's uh Easter season or Lent or whenever you're watching this, maybe Advent, read these letters during one of the great liturggical seasons of the year as spiritual reading. They are very edifying.

So anyway, I got into reading Ignatius of Antioch. And as I'm reading along through his letters, now again, the context is this. He's being taken by the Romans to Rome to be martyed. And every night as they're moving towards Rome, they stop in a different city for the night. And Ignatius basically dashes off a letter to the local Christian congregation urging them to stay faithful to the gospel. And we have seven of these letters that are extant. That means still in existence. And like I said, they're very edifying reading. And so I'm reading along from one letter to another. And as I'm doing that, I'm getting increasingly nervous because he is sounding more and more Catholic. Okay. He says things like, "Wherever the bishop is, there is the Catholic Church." Ouch. Okay. I was taught that bishops were unbiblical, and I thought the word Catholic was invented in the 1200s. So here we are only a decade out from the death of the Apostle John. Already they're using the term Catholic to distinguish the true church from various sects and cults that are rising up. In another place, Ignatius says, "Only that Eucharist is valid which is approved by your bishop." Again, ouch. We did not use the term Eucharist. In fact, I was 30 years old before I knew what that term meant. When I got to Notre Dame, I wasn't clear on what the Eucharist exactly was. We just use the term Lord's Supper. And again, uh, I was taught in my church government class that the principle of Calvinist church government is no bishops need apply. I remember can still remember my church government professor walking into class and telling us all that very statement.

I got to the end of chapter 6 of Ignatius of Antioch, his letter to the Smans. This is the Christians of Smyrna, modern-day Ismar in Turkey. And he's writing to the local congregation of Smyrnians. And he's warning them about the heretics. And he gives many characteristics of the heretics, that is to say, of false teachers. And so I'm going through his list of false teachings. And I get to a climactic uh characteristic where St. Ignatius says, uh, you got to stay away from everyone who, and here I'm going to quote, refuses to confess the eukarist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the father in his goodness raised up. I read that and I was completely shocked. So I went back and read it again. The heretics, he says, refuse to confess the eukarist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the father in his goodness raised up. And I read it a third time and I remember thinking to myself, "Oh no, there is no way to get a symbolic interpretation out of what he just said." In fact, what he's doing is ruling out symbolic interpretations and saying if you've got a symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist, you are a false teacher because you need to confess. And he says confess, which had a very technical particular meaning in early Christianity was it it meant to state something or to profess something as a statement of faith of what you believed in. So to confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of Jesus Christ. And then he says, "Which suffered and which was raised?" And it occurred to me, "Why does he say which? Why doesn't he say who?"

So I found the Greek. Remember that Greek major. So I found the original Greek of this letter to the Smyrnians. And there in the Greek, it's even clearer because in the Greek language, you have gendered nouns and gendered pronouns. And so the rule is that the pronoun has to agree with its antecedent noun in gender. So if the word is feminine, then the later or the noun is feminine, then then the later pronoun has to be feminine as well. And so when you're reading this sentence in Greek, it's crystal clear because the word for flesh is feminine and Jesus obviously is masculine. So, Ignatius says they refuse to confess the Eucharist to be the flesh sirs feminine of the Lord Jesus Christ which and the word which which is which we call a relative pronoun is feminine in the sentence. It's referring back to the flesh of Jesus not to Jesus in some uh generic sense but specifically to the flesh of Jesus. So the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, which flesh we can say suffered for our sins and which flesh we can say the father raised up. Wow. You see, it's so graphic. It's so tangible. The mental image of Ignatius of Antioch is you must confess the Eucharist to be Jesus's flesh. The same flesh that was beaten at the pillar and scourged and nailed to the cross. And the same flesh that was raised through the grave claws and passed through the walls of the tomb on Easter Sunday at the resurrection. That flesh is what the Eucharist is. And those who do not confess this are false teachers and true Christians, which is to say Catholic Christians should stay away from them.

Oh my goodness. All of this was jelling in my brain and kind of crushing itself into my consciousness at once. And all kinds of thoughts are going through my head. One thought was if I was teleported back to the first century, I would not be recognized as a true Christian because I held that the mass was a condemnable idolatry because in it bread and wine were worshiped as if they were God. But the faith of the early Christians were was that the Eucharist is actually Jesus's flesh and blood. And that's why it was worshiped because he is body, blood, soul and divinity etc. You know the doctrinal uh formulations of that. So that was one thought I would not be recognized as a true Christian in the early church. I started having other thoughts. I'm like if this is true then I have been wrong the whole time. And I felt like a Russian spy who wanders into an American library and happens upon a book about bullsheism and starts reading about communism and realizes, "Oh my gosh, I am playing for the wrong team. You know, I am on the wrong side." And if the Eucharist really is Christ's flesh and that's the teaching of the New Testament and I know that I knew that the plain sense of all the passages of the New Testament simply taught that the Eucharist was Jesus either flesh Sarkcs or his body s okay so that's a literal sense and now the earliest of the church fathers are affirming that and then I thought to myself well wait a sec maybe Ignatius is an exception maybe he's oneoff as the British say. It's the only one that says this. Let me check what the other fathers say. And guess what I found out? Ignatius is not an exception. The other fathers say the same thing in various ways. I'll just give one example. St. Augustine, who is revered by Lutheran and Calvinists and Catholics, everybody reveres him. St. Augustine says Jesus held his own body in his hands at the last supper. In another place, St. Augustine says, "It is not a sin to worship the Eucharist. It is a sin not to worship the Eucharist." And when I came across that quote of Augustine, I thought to myself, what were we thinking? Why do we have this doctrinal statement that it's a condemnable idolatry when our great theological hero, the uh the man after whom John Calvin modeled himself and from whom John Calvin claimed to get all of his doctrine? When this very man says that it is a sin not to worship the Eucharist, what are we doing saying it is a condemnable idolatry? And then all kinds of other uh you know thoughts were coming to my mind. I would close my eyes and I look I would look down the shaft of history and it seemed like you know everybody with a black hat was suddenly getting a white hat and everybody with a white hat was suddenly getting a black hat. It was like that that old game Aello if you've ever played that with the flipping white and black discs and and and all my heroes are suddenly wearing black hats and all their opponents are suddenly wearing white hats and I'm like this can't be the case. And I even had this mental image where I closed my eyes and and the pope was walking towards me. It was John Paul II at the time, but he wasn't dressed like the pope. He was dressed like Darth Vader. He's walking towards me, you know, with the imperial march going on and he's saying, you know, John, I am your father. I'm like, no, no, this cannot be happening. I I don't want to become Catholic. And you have to understand, the Catholic Church is the only religious organization I know where people convert kicking and screaming. We're like they don't want to convert but they feel like they have to. It's like I don't want to do this but confirm me anyway, you know, because of the truth of it. And that was exactly my my uh feeling. It wasn't that I wanted to swim the tyber. It was more like there was this tractor beam pulling me in despite I'm trying to back my way out.

But again to to explain the situation, this is my logic. This is my logic. If all of the statements of the New Testament about the Eucharist are simply that it is the flesh and the body of Jesus and if the fathers from the very earliest who knew the apostles themselves all the way to fathers who wrote later some you know in the case of Augustine 400 years after the birth of our Lord. If all of the fathers consistently teach what the New Testament uh lays down in its plain and natural sense, that is to say that the Eucharist simply is Jesus's flesh. If that's the teaching of scripture and the fathers and these early martyrs, who am I at a distance of 2,000 years and 6,500 miles at least to reject that? And I would ask you too watching this to ask yourself that question as well. You know, if this is the teaching of scripture and maybe some uh Protestants are watching this, I'm sure some are. Okay. And I respect your love of scripture and and and uh I'm sure you believe that the Bible is inspired and inherent and uh and free from all errors, etc. Okay. If that's the case, if the scripture teaches it and the church fathers do as well, then who are you and who am I to reject that teaching? Is it that God can't make the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ? Of course, he can. He can speak and make anything into anything. He is the creator. So, it is not that God lacks the power. So what is uh what is the reticence there? What is the um what is impeding us from simply accepting uh this teaching of the scriptures and the church?

So I'm sitting there back in uh this would be the year 2000. I'm sitting there in my apartment. All of these thoughts are going through my head. I'm thinking this is my this is my reasoning. If the Eucharist truly is Jesus's flesh, then that is a bigger truth. and a a clear and present reality that I need to respond to that is so much more important than all of the abstract and trivial things that we tend to argue about in theology like the various ways that God might predestin etc. I don't mean to disparage those. Those things are important. But if the Eucharist is the flesh of Jesus, that is clear and present and a demanding truth that requires my response. It is a bigger deal to speak colloquially than a lot of other things that we argue about. And so if it's his flesh and Catholics are the only ones that stay true to that teaching from the scriptures and the ancient church, then I need to become Catholic so that I can commune in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. That is so much that that makes the papacy pale. You know the question of the papacy and arguments about the papacy that pales in comparison to the Eucharist being Jesus's flesh. Arguments about the blessed mother, those pale in comparison to the eukarist being the flesh and blood of Jesus.

So based on Christ's real presence in the Eucharist, I decided to become Catholic within 36 hours, within a day and a half of reading Ignatius of Antioch, his letter to the Smyrnians, where he gives testimony to that real presence doctrine. Now there was a lot more that had to be worked out. I kind of mentally pulled the trigger uh within so to speak to become Catholic at that point, but so much else needed to be worked out. It was another several months before uh my wife and I, because she was on this journey with me, could arrange uh to be confirmed. Um but all of the rest of those details, that's for a different day and a different story. Uh suffice it for now to say that February 24th, 2001, I was confirmed by Bishop Jenkee uh the then auxiliary of Fort Wayne Southbend. He went on to become the ordinary of Peoria. And thanks be to God, I came into the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. [Music]