Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.

St. Paul tells us, “Test everything; hold fast to what is good.” Intellectually, and practically, Catholicism seemed to do this. As an example, consider virtue. Or, rather, a virtue. Bravery, say. What is it? According to the Catholic tradition, which goes back to antiquity (to Aristotle, as a matter of fact), a virtue is, simply enough, a good habit. If you have the virtue of bravery, that means that you are in the habit of standing firm in times of danger, even though you are afraid. If you have the virtue of honesty, that means that you are in the habit of telling the truth, even though it might benefit you to lie.

This is important. This description of virtue not only tells me what virtue is; it tells me how to get it. How can I become brave? By getting in the habit of behaving bravely. And how can I do that? By choosing to stand firm when the going gets tough. I can start with small things, indeed I’ll have to start with small things. Major battles don’t come every day. But if I can get in the habit of standing firm, then when the crisis comes and there is no time to think, I can trust that my established habits will take over and I will do the right thing. The same applies to honesty, chastity, or any other virtue.

Now, this is basic moral philosophy. But despite my having been a Christian my entire life, and having been actively involved in a church for all of my adult life, I’d never heard virtue described in that way–to the extent it was talked about at all.

But the Roman Catholic writers I was reading all seemed to take it as a matter of course. They referred to it, and they all seemed to be on the same page. And when I thought about it, so was C.S. Lewis. In his writings, though, he tends to avoid using the standard well-known terms so as to present the material freshly, as he does in The Abolition of Man where he spends an entire book writing about the Natural Law and never once uses the term. For this is basic moral philosophy, and it used to be that everyone knew it. And yet I hadn’t, despite having every opportunity. But the Catholic bloggers and writers did.

This is a humble example, but it illustrates my point. The Catholic tradition tests everything and holds on to what is good. I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that every Roman Catholic knows these things, or that the definition of virtue is preached in every parish. But this wealth of knowledge is readily available if you look for it, and it’s all of a piece. It hangs together.

It’s hard to find this kind of unity of thought in Protestantism. There’s unity on basic things, but there are so many different streams of theology in Protestantism that unity is not to be looked for; and then there’s the tendency of Protestants (myself not excluded) when presented with an issue to pick up the Bible, find something that applies, and wing it.

As I commented in the previous post, it was at about this time that I read Mark Shea’s By What Authority: An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition. Mark points out the verse from Matthew, “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” and observes that here Jesus is promising to look after his church…which should include preserving it from error.

Oh, dear. And that accumulated body of Catholic tradition made it appear that perhaps this was true. That perhaps the Roman Catholic Church really was the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and that Jesus had really taken special care of it over the last 2000 years.

This was a glorious and dreadful thought. Glorious, because of the vision of God’s power working through the sweep of history to preserve His church, His body, from error; dreadful, because, of course, I was Anglican rather than Roman Catholic.

And I mean really, truly dreadful. I discussed my thinking with a close friend of ours, who told me (more or less), “I hear what you’re saying, but don’t forget the importance of Christian community. You’ve got a great community there at St. Luke’s–can you find that in a Catholic parish?” I won’t try to tell Jane’s story here, as mine is complicated enough, but it suffices to say that she shared this concern–in spades. Anyway, I didn’t want to be Catholic. I love St. Luke’s; I love the people at St. Luke’s; I love the worship at St. Luke’s; and Jesus is clearly both sought and found at St. Luke’s. Jane had attended there from a child, we were married there, our four children were baptized there, we’d taken our stand for orthodoxy there when we’d voted to leave the Episcopal Church and take refuge in the Anglican Church of Uganda.

But of course, Anglicanism is a branch of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. So I’d always been taught; couldn’t I claim the same tradition while remaining at St. Luke’s?

Part 6 is here.

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.

I first met Chesterton when I was in college, via the Father Brown stories. One of the advisors to our IVCF group suggested the The Man Who Was Thursday, which I read and mostly failed to appreciate; and I recall picking up The Everlasting Man and finding it not at all like Mere Christianity as I had been led to believe. In fact, I found it impenetrable…which given my gross lack of familiarity with the intellectual currents in which Chesterton swam is unsurprising. Despite that unpromising beginning, I found myself picking up the occasional book now and then, as I ran across them–Four Faultless Felons, Orthodoxy, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Heretics, and so on–and eventually I put my hand on Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, a figure I knew virtually nothing about. I bought the book mostly because it was by Chesterton, and I was in a book-buying mood.

And I was enchanted. I’m afraid most of the actual facts swept past, borne rushing away on Chesterton’s glorious stream of verbiage, but the fundamental sanity of St. Thomas shone clearly through.

Some background is needed. The “Philosophy 101” class I’d took as an undergrad spent a fair amount of time on Plato, then slid right over Aristotle and Aquinas to Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Hegel, Kant, and Marx. Hume was the sticking point for me. He insisted that all knowledge comes from sense-experience, and then, as I recall, concluded that alas! we really can’t trust our sense experience either. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying.) In the end, he concluded that, consequently, we can’t really know much of anything for sure. He called this a conclusion; I called it an absurdity.
I was, in fact, completely disgusted. I left college with not much use for philosophy and a definite sense that any system of thought that regarded objective reality as something that needed to be proven wasn’t worth spending my time on. And all of the modern philosophers we studied, from Descartes on, seemed to start with the assumption that such proof was necessary (”cogito ergo sum”). And later philosophers, I found out, mostly started with the assumption that such proof was impossible.

Aquinas, though, and Aristotle before him, they took objective reality as a given! The world doesn’t need to be proven; it amply demonstrates itself. This was a shock and a delight. At last, here were philosophers that it might be worth my time to listen to. Not just then, of course, because I was ”so” frightfully busy, but I resolved, someday, to spend some time with Aquinas and see what he had to say. Not immediately; it sounded like rather a major project. But someday.

Then I noticed that several of the bloggers I was reading, notably Mark Shea and Tom of Disputations, quoted Aquinas (and Chesterton!) from time to time, and not just as an interesting nugget but in the heat of argument. (It was also at about this time that I read Mark’s By What Authority and Peter Kreeft’s Back to Virtue.) It also began to seem to me that they had deeper wells of argument to draw from than many of the other bloggers I was reading, that they were standing on deeper and firmer intellectual foundations. What were those foundations? Where did they come from? And for the first time I really came face-to-face with the intellectual tradition of Roman Catholicism.

Let me digress for a moment. People often want religion to be simple, but as Lewis noted that’s the point: nothing real is simple. Physics isn’t simple; chemistry isn’t simple; things that are real are complicated. If Christianity is true, we ought to expect it to be complicated, with lots of intricate little details and occasional results of elegance, beauty and deceptive simplicity. Now, our knowledge of Physics and Chemistry accumulates. No one expects a budding physicist to work it all out from scratch; instead, there are these neat things called “textbooks” that contain the basics of the field and then build on them. If Christianity is real, we should expect to be able to do the same thing, and with more reason. If God is all-good and unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, then a truth once learned can and should be held onto. We might, over time, find that “it’s more complicated than that”, we might need to develop our knowledge further, as Einstein revised Newton (though even Newton gets the job done for many practical purposes).

And in the books and web pages I was reading, I thought, I was beginning to see the outlines of such an accumulated body of knowledge.

Part 5 is here.

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.

In 1997 everything changed. Our first son was born that year, and though we continued faithfully attending St. Luke’s every Sunday our lives were (and are) consumed with parenthood. Coincidentally, it was also at about this time (December of 1996, actually) that I began posting book reviews on line–but I digress. And so we were more or less distracted until 2003, when Gene Robinson was elected and consecrated the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, an event that polarized–and well-nigh created–the Anglican Blogosphere. I don’t see any value in rehashing all of the details here; if you’ve not been following along, I’ll simply note that the events of 2003 revealed that the division in the Anglican Communion on matters of sexuality, biblical interpretation, and Christian orthodoxy was far deeper and wider than most of us had realized up until that time. Kendall Harmon, who blogs at Titus OneNine, dubbed the two camps the “reappraisers” (those who wish to interpret scripture in accord with modern needs) and the “reasserters” (those who wish to interpret scripture as the Church has always interpreted scripture).

Jane and I, along with most of the people at St. Luke’s, were and are firmly in the “reasserters” camp. The phrase our pastor used was “biblical orthodoxy”–at St. Luke’s, as at a handful of other parishes in our diocese, we would strive to be “biblically orthodox”. And that was well and good. “Biblically orthodox” described in a nutshell what we wanted to be, and what the reappraisers did not seem to care about.

Only, what did it mean? What did being “biblically orthodox” entail? Being true to the scriptures, obviously; but what were the specifics? The Nicene Creed was involved, and I knew something about that and what it meant and where it came from; but the “reappraisers” also recited the Nicene Creed. In the end, I decided that Kendall Harmon had it right: to be a “reasserter” was to interpret scripture as the Church has always interpreted scripture. So…how had the Church always interpreted scripture?

I’m a bit of a history buff, and I’d read quite a bit about the Roman world during the time the Christian faith was born, but I’d never boned up on the Early Church in the years following the Acts of the Apostles. I resolved to remedy that. One of the books I read was Rod Bennett’s Four Witnesses, a book about four of the earliest of the Church Fathers: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus of Lyons. Bennett’s book includes a biographical sketch of each along with excerpts from their writings. Not coincidentally, he shows how their writings span the first two hundred years of the Church’s history, and how each was in a position to receive the gospel either from the apostles (Clement came to Rome during Peter’s lifetime) or from those who had known them. Bennett, in fact, details the workings of the Apostolic Succession during those early days.

At the end of the volume, Bennett tells some of his story. He came to the Fathers from a Baptist background, looking for answers to some questions he had…and once they’d been answered to his satisfaction he was a Roman Catholic. (As Lewis noted, a young man can’t be too careful about the books he reads.)

Hmmm. I was not entirely surprised; here were bishops, deacons, and priests as an essential part of the Church, and here was Justin Martyr’s description of the mass, which might as well have been a description of the mass I attended right up until I got married. But Anglicanism also has bishops, deacons, and priests and claims the Apostolic Succession. So that was OK.

In addition to reading about the Early Church, I was also reading widely in the Anglican Blogosphere, just to keep up with the news. In addition to Titus OneNine, Chris Johnson’s Midwest Conservative Journal, and Captain Yips, all blogs I still look at daily, there was one by an anonymous Episcopal Priest who called himself the “Pontificator”. He was involved in a detailed investigation of Anglicanism and whether it could truly be considered a branch of the Catholic (i.e., “Universal”) Church, along side the Roman Catholic church and the various Orthodox churches. In time he concluded that it could not, and swam across the Tiber. This was somewhat distressing, as my original entry into the Episcopal Church had been based on the (not particularly well-researched) assumption that it could.

There were two other threads that worked their way into my thinking at this time. In addition to reading Anglican blogs I’d done a fair amount of surfing around and reading other Christian bloggers, and much to my surprise the ones I found myself going back to time and again, outside of those listed above, were the Catholic blogs, especially those of Mark Shea and Amy Welborn. Mark was genuinely funny, and was also, like the Anglican blogs I was reading, fighting the good fight for Orthodoxy. There was a difference, though: Mark generally entered the fray cheerfully and with gusto, rather than without the anger and frustration I was used to hearing from the Anglican bloggers, nor was he distracted by every little shift in the wind among the major Anglican players. It was refreshing. And Amy somehow managed to maintain a thoroughly irenic tone, even while dealing with contentious issues.

The other thread began with G.K. Chesterton.

Part 4 is here.

Part 1 is here.

So I swam the Thames and settled down to being married.

Much happened over the next ten years. Jane and I involved ourselves with the daily life at St. Luke’s: we both served on Sundays as chalice bearers, we attended (and, upon occasion led) weekly bible studies, we went on retreats, we made our Cursillos and were subsequently active in the Cursillo community in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Looking back, there were two trends of note during this time. First, the teaching at St. Luke’s moved from the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum towards the Evangelical Protestant end of the spectrum under the influence of such men of God as Frank Lyons, then our associate pastor and now Anglican Bishop of Bolivia, Praveen Bunyan, later rector for a time of St. James Church in Newport Beach, and Ron Jackson, our rector for many years, who has recently been called to a teaching position at Trinity Seminary in England. I learned a great deal from all of them, and owe them all a great debt of gratitude for their teaching, friendship, and wise counsel over the years.

As the teaching became more Evangelical so bit by bit did my own personal understanding of Christianity move away from the Catholicism of my youth, until finally I ran into Calvinism and rebounded. (I’m tempted to say “recoiled”, but I have too many friends and acquaintances who profess some form of Calvinism to put it quite that strongly, and in any event I’ve promised to keep to a positive note in this series of essays.) I say “rebounded” because when I first came seriously to with the tenets of Calvinism I discovered that I simply could not accept them. Accordingly to Calvin and his followers, each human being is either saved or damned from all eternity. The Damned can do nothing to achieve salvation, and the Elect can do nothing to lose their salvation. I found that I simply could not believe this. It’s clear to me that I cannot save myself, that salvation is the gift of Jesus through his death and resurrection…but it’s equally clear to me that I can refuse to receive that gift. A man stranded on a rooftop during a flood might be unable to swim to safety, and yet still (through fear, or underestimating the danger) refuse to be rescued. If he stays on that rooftop, he will surely die…and he can choose to do so. At the same time, it was clear that Calvinism was an intellectually clear and internally consistent statement of Christian faith, a faith that had sustained many Christian communities over the years. From an intellectual point of view, it was a great pity that I couldn’t accept it; but I couldn’t. In the end, the effect of this discovery was that I began reflecting on the intellectual basis for my faith and reconsidering my easy slide away from Anglo-Catholicism.

The second trend was the discovery, through my participation in the larger community and attendance at two or three diocesan conventions, of troubling currents in the teaching of the Episcopal Church in general and the Diocese of Los Angeles in particular. The presenting issue was homosexuality, but it became clear over time that there was more going on: John Shelby Spong, the Bishop of Newark, had, in addition to being a staunch supporter of the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of the church, had also written books in which he had explicitly denied the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, indeed, all the major points of the Nicene Creed. And yet he was still a bishop, and (so far as I could tell) honored by his colleagues in the House of Bishops. And from what I could tell at diocesan convention, there were many in our diocese that felt the same way.

I spent considerable time wrestling with the issue of homosexuality, but none wrestling with Spong’s open rejection of the Creed. I think now, as I thought then, that if he could not in good conscience uphold the beliefs he had vowed to uphold at his ordination and consecration, then in good conscience he should resign his position and leave the church. And I simply could not understand how such open and explicit apostasy could be so easily tolerated. But I took refuge in the thought that the Dioceses of Los Angeles and Newark were aberrations, and that the true faith, so clearly taught at St. Luke’s, was also taught in the wider Episcopal Church.

Part 3 is here.

My family were Sunday-and-Christmas Catholics. That is to say, we went to mass on Sundays (unless we were on vacation) and on Christmas day. We didn’t go to mass on any other holy days; we didn’t have prayer cards, scapulars, or rosaries; we went to public school rather than Catholic school; and we never stayed for coffee after the service, assuming that there was coffee after the service. I know there was sometimes, but whether it was a regular thing I can’t say.

Religious observances outside church were confined to prayers at bedtime and grace before dinner. We weren’t tepid about religion, precisely; but for my dad, being Catholic was something you did, not something you talked about. My dad still goes to mass every Sunday, and he still doesn’t talk about it. For my mom, being Catholic was something other people did; she was Methodist, and though she went to mass with dad every Sunday, she followed up by going to the local Methodist church immediately afterward. I suspect that’s why my childhood lacked certain traditionally Catholic markers.

I was born a year after Vatican II began, and although I have vague memories of my elder siblings carrying big heavy missals to mass I don’t recall ever hearing the mass said in Latin. From the time I first began to pay attention, it was all English. Catechism class, or “CCD”, was similar; I suppose my siblings probably remember the pre-Vatican II catechism, but I went through CCD during those heady days when the “Spirit of Vatican II” excused a multitude of well-intentioned experimentation. I don’t know if this explains anything, and I think all of my CCD teachers were doing their best; but as an example, though we were all given rosaries one year we spent less than a class session on how to pray the rosary. I was left with a vague notion that you said an Our Father followed by a bunch of Hail Mary’s, lather, rinse, repeat; nobody ever hinted that there was more to it than that.

I went through First Communion, and later on was duly confirmed; and after that CCD was over and done with, as was any involvement at my local church beyond going to mass on Sunday.

I went through something of a crisis of faith during my high school years; which is to say that I found God to be increasingly inconvenient and thought that I’d be happier if I could be sure He wasn’t really there. That ended my senior year due to some circumstances I won’t go into at the moment; it was that year that I really first made up my mind to follow Christ.

Oddly, that was also the year I started consorting with Protestants. A friend took me to a high school group at the local Episcopal church, and I started attending that regularly; in fact, though it isn’t where we first met, that group is where I first really got to know my wife Jane. Then I went off to college; and rather than attending the small Catholic mass in the school chapel I went to the local parish church and joined the campus InterVarsity Christian Fellowship group. I was active in IVCF all four years of college and grew considerably in my faith; and that whole time I attended mass every Sunday at Our Lady of the Assumption where I never got to know anybody.

After college I went to Stanford for graduate school, and at Stanford, oddly, I actually got in with a group of young Catholic adults at the campus Newman Center. That was probably my most Catholic year to date, and I remember it fondly.

I started dating Jane that year, and after I got my degree I returned to Southern California. I went back to attending my old church every Sunday, where I knew (almost) nobody, and Jane and I joined a young adult group at a Catholic church in Pasadena which we found out about because the folks I knew at Stanford knew some folks in that group. We made many friends there; ironically, the only one we still keep in regular touch with isn’t Roman Catholic (nor was he then).

Do you begin to see a pattern here? Every since I first decided to take my faith seriously, I’d been involved in some kind of Christian community; but except for that one year at Stanford, the community I was in was always completely separate from where I attended mass.

Around this time Jane and I decided to get married; and that raised the question of where we were going to go to church. And that was a big deal, because Jane was Episcopalian and she found mass at St. James to be rather underwhelming. Yes, the service had a lot in common with the service she was used to; but….

But there wasn’t any coffee hour after the service. Or if there was, I didn’t know about it, and I certainly wasn’t able to introduce her to anyone. At her church, St. Luke’s, she knew everybody. And the singing at St. James was subpar by her standards (she was in choir for years), and we never sang more than two verses of any hymn. And some people left the church right after communion, instead of waiting for the closing hymn; and if they did wait for the closing hymn, they were often out the door before it was over. Which given that we never sang more than two versions meant they had to move fast after the priest left the altar.

And besides, I didn’t know anybody.

To me, “church” meant “the Eucharist”; to Jane, “church” meant “the community”. And given that her church had the Eucharist as well, she really couldn’t see leaving St. Luke’s, where she already belonged to the community, to attend St. James, where I didn’t.

We spent a season or two attending both churches every Sunday, and we had both a Catholic and an Episcopal priest at our wedding; but we were married at St. Luke’s, and after the wedding that’s where we went to church. Some months later I was formally received into the Episcopal Church by our local bishop.

Continuing to attend both churches wasn’t a reasonable solution. Jane and I agreed that we needed to pick a church, and stick with it; my parents’ mixed marriage had worked OK, but it certainly hadn’t been optimal.

I figured it like this. St. Luke’s was what used to be called a “high church” anglo-catholic parish, so the service was very similar to the mass I was used to; in fact, in some ways it seemed even more Catholic than I was used to. St. James was still in the throes of Vatican II, but at St. Luke’s even the choir members wore cassocks, and processed into the church preceded by acolytes bearing candles. I learned that, being a branch of Anglicanism the Episcopal Church could still claim the apostolic succession. And Episcopal doctrine, as it was explained to me, appeared to be everything I wanted in a doctrine, and less. Which is to say, so far as it went it agreed pretty well with what I’d always believed; there was simply less of it, and it didn’t go so far. The doctrine of the Eucharist is a case in point. Episcopalians believed, so I was told, in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Prayer Book didn’t define precisely what “Real Presence” meant, and certainly didn’t insist on transubstantiation; but if I wanted to go on thinking about it that way, there was no harm done. The Marian doctrines were similar–some Episcopalians revered Mary, and there was nothing stopping me from doing so…but there was no insistence on it either.

In short, I could join the Episcopal Church without being asked either to renounce any of the beliefs I held dear, or to believe in anything new. I could, it was presented to me, simply transfer my allegiance from one bishop to another. If Jane were to become Catholic, however, she would be asked to believe many things she hadn’t previously been asked to believe; and she’d lose the parish community she was used to. Put that way, the answer seemed clear. I had little to lose but the Pope and, possibly, some doctrines to which I wasn’t particularly attached. What I had to gain was a happy bride.

Part 2 is here.