By ROBERT IAN WILLIAMS
How could you do it? Were you really converted? Do you worship Mary now? How can you tell your innermost secrets to another man in confession? Do you really know Jesus Christ? Why did you convert? How can you accept teaching that is not in the Bible?
These are a few of the questions I have been asked since being received into the Catholic Church. As the years have passed they have become more frequent, and so I have decided to put pen to paper, to answer the curious. I hope this short account will help Catholics understand the mindset of Evangelicals and will help the intelligent Evangelical think about the crucial issue that lies at the heart of this matter, the issue of authority.
My entry into the Catholic Church was not a Damascus road conversion. Although God can work like that, my journey to the historic faith was a gradual learning experience. Conversion is ultimately a spiritual affair, but many factors can contribute to it. My dissatisfaction with the confusion I found within Evangelical Christianity was a starting point. That I could discern the weaknesses of this system I believe was the grace of God.
Before that dissatisfaction began, I was perfectly happy with Evangelical Christianity. I had trusted in Christ, believed my sins were forgiven, and thought I knew the gospel of the New Testament. As regards other religions, I thought they were all wrong. More particularly, I viewed the Catholic Church as an apostate Church, full of medieval corruption, obscuring the gospel, and leading souls astray. I was convinced that the Word of God found in the Bible was the sole authority for the believer (sola scriptura) and that I was justified by faith alone (sola fide). These were the two rallying cries of the Reformation. When I met Catholics, I tried to show them the truth and lead them to a knowledge of the Lord. I was so anti-Catholic I refused to pray in an Evangelical prayer meeting that was held in the Catholic chaplaincy at my university. I knew that the Evangelical Christian Union sought the conversion of Catholics, and I thought it plain hypocrisy.
God's grace was beginning to work in my heart. This began over the issue of baptism. Evangelical Christians are sharply divided between those who accept infant baptism and those who believe baptism is for the adult believer only. I studied the facts and could find no explicit reference to infant baptism in the New Testament, so I decided to inquire when this practice entered Christianity. Could it be traced to the apostles, or did it creep in during the early centuries? I found that the historical record endorsed infant baptism. If it had been an innovation, why was there no record in Church history of protest at its introduction? I could find no Christian group prior to the sixteenth century that rejected infant baptism. Even then these first Baptist Christians only sprinkled the adult believer. Immersion (also held as a sticking point by some Evangelicals) only came about in the seventeenth century. I found Baptist Church histories short on accuracy and continuity.
I therefore rejected adult-only baptism. To me this was a key area of truth, and I tried to convince Baptist Evangelicals of the error of their belief. I was told by some that I was becoming obsessed with a peripheral issue. This shocked me. How could a solemn command of Jesus Christ be regarded as peripheral? I was amazed at the words of a renowned Evangelical leader, Martyn Lloyd-Jones. In his book What Is an Evangelical? he comments on Evangelical disunity and states: "Another matter we must put in the same category is the age and mode of baptism: the age of the candidate, and the mode of administering the rite of baptism. I would put that again into the non-essential category for the same reason, that you cannot prove one or the other from the Scriptures. I have been reading books on the subject for the last 44 years and more, and I know less about it now than I did at the beginning. Therefore, while I assert, and w e must all assert, that we believe in baptism, for that is plainly commanded, yet we must not divide and separate over the age of the candidate or over the mode of administration."
Here was a man who believed that the Bible was the only authority for the believer, and yet he could not establish the biblical pattern for baptism. It was truly a case of ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth. Ironically Lloyd-Jones in the same volume teaches the perspicuity of Scripture and that Evangelicalism is clearer in its thinking than Catholicism! This suddenly focused in my mind the other disagreements among Evangelicals. If they were peripheral, why the separate denominations and the various theories on the Lord's return, the meaning of the Lord's Supper, and whether the believer could lose his salvation, or the dispute over the charismatic gifts? The list could go on.
My academic training was that of a historian, so I looked carefully and objectively at Church history. I was amazed to find that I could find no trace of Evangelical Christianity in the Church prior to the sixteenth century. Even the Waldensians and followers of Wyclif knew nothing of justification by faith alone. Both groups participated in the sacraments of the Catholic Church and were originally "reform" movements, not churches. Not one of the early Church Fathers preached justification by faith alone. Wyclif died hearing Mass, unbaptized as a believer, satisfied with his Catholic infant baptism!
The theory that the acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth Century had begun the corruptions in the Church seemed even less credible. I found that the early Church leaders believed in infant baptismal regeneration, bishops, apostolic succession, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a sacrificing priesthood, prayers for the dead, and a special role for the bishop of Rome. All this could be found centuries prior to Constantine. In the words of Cardinal Newman, "he that studies history ceases to be a Protestant." I could find no record of Evangelical Bible Christians, a faithful remnant clinging to the distinctive Evangelical tenets of Scripture alone and justification by faith alone. Evangelical treatment of Church history was superficial. It talked of men such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Athanasius as Bible-only Christians. In reality it ignored the obvious Catholic context and was intellectually dishonest.
I found that Evangelical history was based on myths. The Catholic Church, I had been told, had burned copies of the Bible. I found that the Church had guarded the Bible, defined its canon, and burned and forbade reading of editions that were inaccurate, heretical translations. Bibles such as Tyndale's translation had footnotes attacking the Church and the pope. I found that translations into vernacular languages were made years before the Reformation. The Gospels had been translated into Anglo-Saxon long before the English language was formed.
I also found that the famous Book of Martyrs, written by John Foxe, a sixteenth-century apostate Catholic, was historically inaccurate. Many of the "martyrs" in the reign of Mary Tudor were unorthodox and would have been burned in the reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Indeed, Foxe supported a regime that tortured and killed Catholics who simply wanted to live in the faith of their ancestors. He also supported a regime that burned Evangelical Christians such as Baptists! It was Protestant Christians who had persecuted the Puritan Pilgrim Fathers of seventeenth-century England, and that group in turn, on settling in America, had persecuted fellow Bible believers!
I had accepted the completely false idea perpetuated by Lloyd-Jones and other Evangelical teachers that Catholics believed in continuing revelation. I found on the contrary that Catholic doctrine was that public revelation ceased with the apostles and that the faith had been once delivered to the saints. It was the du ty of t he Church as the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15) to interpret and discern that original deposit. The Catholic Church had not invented transubstantiation in the thirteenth century any more than it had invented the Trinity in the fourth. As an Evangelical I was perplexed to find myself in the same position as the Jehovah's Witness, who say the word "Trinity" is not in the Bible. I would respond that the teaching was there and the term just defined it. Yet the Catholic could say the same to me about purgatory. My response was that purgatory cannot be clearly seen. This was a weak reply, as Evangelicals are subjective as to what they see. After all, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and a host of others could see infant baptism, while Spurgeon, Billy Graham, and others could not. The Catholic teaching was more logical. God had established a Church to be the final arbiter, and he was not the author of confusion. The development of doctrine is like the development of a photographic image. The image is on the film, but as time and circumstance change the image emerges clearer.
I could not find one text that asserted that the Bible alone was sufficient. The famous passage that asserts that Scripture is profitable (2 Tim. 3:16) means it is helpful but not sufficient. It is profitable for me to drink water for my health, but it is not sufficient. I could not find one verse that taught that the Word of God was purely the enscripturated. I found that Jesus had honored non-scriptural tradition in the Jewish faith community he belonged to. His condemnation of the false interpretation of tradition given by the Pharisees was not a condemnation of tradition per se. The Church he founded on his apostles (Peter in particular) was a Church that accepted teaching both in written epistle and by word of mouth.
I momentarily decided to re-examine my belief in Christ. Could I be deluded? Was Jesus Christ in fact a false messiah? After all, Jews reject him. Could the world's most brilliant and enduring people be wrong? I therefore read Jewish apologetical works against Christianity. They attacked the Christian faith by trying to show that the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible were not fulfilled. They claimed that Jesus never claimed divinity and that later Gentile followers had introduced "pagan concepts" such as the Virgin Birth and the Incarnation. This fascinated me, as much anti-Catholic material claims that distinctive Catholic beliefs are in fact pagan accretions. This is the Evangelical theory taken to its logical conclusion. I was further challenged by one anti-Christian book that asked Christians why there are different churches if Christ's religion was true. Christ's religion seems a failure to the Jewish mind.
Then I looked again at Christ. I could not reject his divinity. I could see that the New Testament witness did teach he was God, and this was not a later pagan development. Modern Judaism was not the same as the Judaism at the time of our Lord. It was a later development and was divided into sects. Even within Orthodox Judaism there are conflicting rabbinic interpretations. So I continued to cling to my belief in Bible-only Christianity. The lifestyle and community of Evangelicalism is comforting, and my attendance at Catholic services seemed cold in comparison.
All this time I was growing increasingly disillusioned with anti-Catholic apologetics. Books like Loraine Boettner's Roman Catholicism (the classic book for anti-Catholics) were in reality gross distortions of doctrine and history. I remember reading a book by one Evangelical who ridiculed the Catholic doctrine of sacramental intention. In fact he was ridiculing a misrepresentation. Classic Evangelical interpretation of the crucial Petrine texts, such as Matthew 16, was, I found, based on defective understanding. The play on the word Petros was peripheral, as our Lord spoke Aramaic. The overwhelming majority of modern-day Evangelical scholars now accept that Peter is the rock and that he was recipient of t he keys of authority in a special way. Just as the ancient kings of Israel delegated their keys of authority to a chief minister, Jesus had appointed Peter as his representative or vicar. Keys in any civilized culture represent power. I found that the anti-Catholic warping of the Church Fathers on this passage was quite deliberate. A theory is put forward that the Fathers are in disagreement that Peter is the rock. Careful examination of their writings reveals that they are commenting on different.aspects of the text. In much the same way as a house can be built on multiple foundations, laid in concrete and on virgin soil.
Contrary to Evangelical myth, there was abundant historical evidence for Peter's stay in Rome and his establishment of its bishopric. Just as our Lord told Peter that flesh and blood had not revealed to him his divinity, I believe it was the gift of God that I could see in the Petrine texts the papacy in embryo. I was amazed to find that as early as the first century (when the apostle John was still alive) the bishop of Rome wrote to the Corinthian Church, giving instructions and warning its members that ignoring this advice would involve them in grave danger. As the centuries progressed the evidence for the papacy increased, and I found that there were sound answers to Evangelical objections. Well do I remember reading the comments of a Catholic in the visitor's book of an Anglican Church. "Where Peter is, there is the Church." Those were the words of Ambrose in the fourth century, and they stuck in my mind. The Anglican Church may have possession of the pre-Reformation churches, but it had not kept the ancient faith. Despite a Catholic veneer painted over her Protestant surface in the nineteenth century, Anglicanism was Protestant. This was manifested in women's ordination and other aberrations. The role of Peter became so clear to me that I could not accept the Eastern Orthodox claim to be the Church of Christ.
In that church (or, more correctly, communion) I found beautiful liturgy, but a lack of magisterial clarity. For instance, until the 1930s every Christian church rejected artificial contraception as intrinsically immoral. In 1930 the Anglican Church approved it, and since then the other churches have followed. That includes the Orthodox. I found that the Orthodox had accepted divorce and remarriage. Only the Catholic Church had stood firm on this issue, even to the extent of losing the English nation in the sixteenth century. The Orthodox had deserted the successor of Peter for the imperial power of Constantinople. They had put their trust in princes, and in the end it had failed them. While this seemed to show to me that the rock of the Catholic Church was firm, I was disturbed by the grass-roots liberalism of some people in the Catholic Church. Then I realized that in the parable of the house on the rock, the rain and wind batter it too. Eccentrics and dissenters would not demolish the house. They could chip away at the rock, but never destroy it.
I found that as with our Lord, the main opposition was in three key areas. At the time of his earthly ministry, the religious authorities were appalled by his claim to be God, his claim to forgive sins, and his assertion that to have eternal life one must eat and drink his body and blood. This today is virulently continued by Evangelicals. How well do I remember how, as an Evangelical, I despised the Catholic teaching of confession to a priest, the belief in transubstantiation, the Mass, the infallibility of the pope and the Church. Only God can be infallible, I remember retorting. Close examination also showed that the Catholic doctrine on Mary was rooted in the word of God and not a pagan import. The fact that pagan religions have goddesses no more invalidates the Catholic teaching on Mary than does pagan belief in sacrifice and temples invalidates biblical concepts of these topics. I found that Catholics do not worship her and that lighting candles in front of her statues is no more idolatrous than members of th e Protestant Truth Society laying a wreath at a statue of Oliver Cromwell. The Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints became real to me. If "the prayer of a righteous man availeth much," the dead in the Lord who are the spirits of just men made perfect would make superlative intercession for us. This is perfectly illustrated in Revelation 5. The twenty-four elders represent the Old and New Testament saints offering up prayer to God.
Before I made my entry into the Catholic Church, a final line of appeal from concerned Evangelicals was that the personal lives of Catholics are in many cases disastrous. This was answered by my reading of Ronald Knox. He was brought up in a strongly Evangelical home and later converted to Catholicism. He once made the observation that if he left his umbrella at the back of a Methodist chapel, it would be there on his return, but probably not there if he had left it in a Catholic church. This was used by Methodists against Knox, but in reality it was a witness against them. Christ came to save sinners, and the net of the Church encompasses all men and women. It is not a club for middle-class Bible readers. The Church of Jesus Christ is a mixed lot, and the capital mistake of the Reformers was to believe that the Church was one hundred percent the elect. Our Lord says, "Many are called, but few are chosen." While I have met some pretty dreadful Catholics, there are still many good people trying to lead holy lives according to the teachings of the Church. The fact that Catholics disobey the teachings of the Church confirms our Lord's words, "that to those whom much has been given, much will be required." Judgment will begin with the Household of God, and Catholics will be more culpable, as having had access to the truth. God at the end of time will separate the wheat and the tares.
I found Evangelicalism, like the Pharisees, concerned with superficial externals. I hope that does not sound harsh, but in effect many Bible Christians have built up a system of rules that condemn perfectly innocuous behavior as unchristian. Some view drinking as a sin and are convinced our Lord drank only grape juice and that the miracle wine at Cana was strictly non-alcoholic. To some dancing is an abomination. The list could go on. I once met Evangelicals who thought smoking was the mark of a non-believer, and yet the nineteenth-century Baptist Evangelist Spurgeon smoked. Others would not buy a lottery ticket and yet would invest their money on the stock exchange. While it is impossible to stereotype Evangelical Christians, they are almost all believers in contraception. God has charge of their money in tithing (Evangelical religion does not come cheap), but not their bodies. The whole system of Bible-only Christianity is subjective. This is well illustrated in the story of the Protestant lady who was asked whether it was true that she and her servant believed that they were the only true Christians. Her reply was "Well, I am not too sure about James!"
I am not alone, and in recent years many conservative Evangelicals have joined the Catholic faith. They have done so even though the road to the Catholic Church was blocked by misrepresentations and opposition. Surely this is because of the grace of God, as there always exists opposition to the Catholic Church-in part a perfect fulfillment of our Lord's words. The opposition comes from the forces of secularism, materialism, modernism, and other philosophies. They all reject the unique claims of the Catholic Church. The Church is the small stone, predicted by Daniel, that would shatter the false image, the mustard seed that would grow into a mighty bush, the way foretold by Isaiah in which foolish men would not err, the house founded on the rock.
Let close with the wise words of a Catholic prelate, Herbert Cardinal Vaughn (1832-1903): "It is a common practice with the opponents of the Catholic Church to endeavor to hold souls back by arraigning before them a multitude of difficul ties and objections against the doctrines of the Church. To this two things may be said. First, it would be easy to string together a most formidable array of difficulties quoted and examined by Catholic theologians in their great scientific works on theology. But it is obvious that it would be necessary to be a trained theologian, or to spend a lifetime in research, were it needful to give detailed answers to them all. Then there are works, like those of anti-Catholic writers, written in order to blind and mislead: made up of calumnies, misquotations, and a calculated admixture of truth and error. These are often intended to shock and alienate the moral sense quite as much as the intellectual. If they do not finally succeed in this, at least they may succeed in creating perplexity, anxiety, and delay. Now, instead of entering into a maze of objections, into a labyrinth of difficulties, a shorter and more satisfactory course should be taken. First find the divine teacher, find the supreme shepherd, find the Vicar of Christ. Concentrate all your mental and moral faculties upon the head of God's Church upon earth. This is the key to the situation."
Originally Published by Catholic.com
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Robert Ian Williams, a Welshman, teaches in London and has published a series of booklets on the Catholic faith and its history. He can be reached at Ecclesia Press, Y Garreg Lwyd, Whitchurch Road, Bangor is y Coed, Wrexham LL13 0BB, U.K.
