I remember distinctly the moment I knew that I had to return to the Catholic Church, in which I had been baptized and confirmed as a youngster. It was in mid-March 2007, only four months after I had been elected the fifty-eighth president of the Evangelical Theological Society, an academic society of about 4,200 members at the time. After decades of assimilating Catholic thought in my spiritual pilgrimage without realizing it, and with the help of some Catholic friends who posed to me just the right questions with just the right degree of gentle prodding, I had been brought to the outer bank of the Tiber. But what finally forced me to take my first steps on the bridge that traversed those seemingly foreboding waters was a passage authored by the renowned Reformed historical theologian Carl Trueman in his review of the book Is the Reformation Over? In it Trueman writes:

Every year I tell my Reformation history class that Roman Catholicism is, at least in the West, the default position. Rome has a better claim to historical continuity and institutional unity than any Protestant denomination, let alone the strange hybrid that is Evangelicalism; in the light of these facts, therefore, we need good, solid reasons for not being Catholic; not being a Catholic should, in other words, be a positive act of will and commitment, something we need to get out of bed determined to do each and every day. It would seem, however, that. . . many who call themselves Evangelical really lack any good reason for such an act of will; and the obvious conclusion, therefore, should be that they do the decent thing and rejoin the Roman Catholic Church. I cannot go down that path myself, primarily because of my view of justification by faith and because of my ecclesiology; but those who reject the former and lack the latter have no real basis upon which to perpetuate what is, in effect, an act of schism on their part. For such, the Reformation is over; for me, the fat lady has yet to sing; in fact, I am not sure at this time that she has even left her dressing room.Carl Trueman, review of Is the Reformation Over?, by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Reformation 21 (November 2005), http://www.reformation21.org/shelf-life/is-the-reformation-over.php.

After reading that paragraph, I felt as if I had been punched in the nose. I realized at that instant that I was in schism with the Catholic Church, and for that reason, the burden was on me and not on the Church to provide an account of my present state of noncommunion. At that moment, my Christian faith ceased to be something that I chose and became something that chose me. It was, as Doug Beaumont notes in his introduction to this wonderful collection, a paradigm shift, a radical reorientation of where one stands in relation to the universal Church. I no longer saw myself standing before an ecclesial buffet of fragmented Western Christendom, eagerly seeking to select those beliefs that conformed to my theological predilections. I found myself under a creed I did not invent rather than a confession that was under my control.

For those who have not taken this sort of journey, who have not ventured outside the confines of Evangelical culture, doctrine, and spirituality, the very idea of being at a crossroads with Catholicism seems almost counterintuitive. The contributors to this volume, including the author of this foreword, were at one time in that very same state of bewilderment when reports of friends and acquaintances drifting to Rome reached our eyes and ears. Why entertain Catholicism, we thought, when some of its essential beliefs—especially on matters over which Evangelical Protestants part ways with Catholics—are “unbiblical” and not part of “historic Christianity”? After all, as we were told by some of the leading lights of Evangelicalism, the Reformation had simply restored what had been believed by the ancient Church but had been corrupted by the “Roman Communion” of the Middle Ages. True Christianity was like a pristine ocean vessel that had over the years acquired all these Catholic barnacles that impeded the ship from smoothly reaching its eternal destination. In contrast, “historic Christianity”, as our Evangelical friends are fond of saying, consists of just a few basic doctrines, easily derived from the Church’s only authority, an inerrant Bible. All the other doctrines over which Christians disagree—e.g., the nature of the sacraments, ecclesiology, women’s ordination, the precise nature of the Incarnation, whether God is inside or outside time, whether one can lose one’s salvation—are either nonessential or, in the case of certain “Catholic” doctrines such as praying for the dead and to the saints, unbiblical.

What the contributors to this volume discovered in their journeys is that this narrative, though having sustained them for many years and having kept them from entertaining Catholicism, could not withstand the scrutiny of historical analysis. Speaking for myself, it was a jarring experience to learn that there were serious problems with the “historic Christianity” story I had uncritically believed for decades as an Evangelical Protestant. Take, for example, the use of the early Church Fathers in the work of Norman L. Geisler, the founder of Southern Evangelical Seminary, the institution that connects all the contributors to this book. In volume 3 of his Systematic Theology, Geisler argues that the Reformers’ understanding of the doctrine of justification can be found in the early Church Fathers. To make his case, he conscripts a few quotations from several of them,The following quotations from Saint John Chrysostom are employed by Norman L. Geisler in his Systematic Theology, vol. 3, Sin, Salvation (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2004), 289-90. However, for the sake of continuity between the two sets of quotations, I am using the version published on the New Advent Catholic website (http://newadvent.org/fathers/). including these from the homilies of Saint John Chrysostom (ca. A.D. 344/354—A.D. 407):

In order then that the greatness of the benefits bestowed may not raise you too high, observe how he brings you down: “by grace you have been saved”, says he, “through faith”; Then, that, on the other hand, our free will be not impaired, he adds also our part in the work, and yet again cancels it, and adds, “And that not of ourselves”.Saint John Chrysostom, Homily 4 on Ephesians.

For this is [the righteousness] “of God” when we are justified not by works (in which case it were necessary that not a spot even should be found) but by grace, in which case all sin is done away.Saint John Chrysostom, Homily 11 on 2 Corinthians.

These comments do indeed sound like what one would find in the sermons of a Calvin or a Luther. Yet, Saint John Chrysostom published many other homilies, two of which contain these words:

Let us then give them aid and perform commemoration for them. For if the children of Job were purged by the sacrifice of their father, why do you doubt that when we too offer for the departed, some consolation arises to them? [For] God is wont to grant the petitions of those who ask for others. And this Paul signified saying that “in a manifold Person your gift toward us bestowed by many may be acknowledged with thanksgiving on your behalf” (2 Cor 1:11). Let us not then be weary in giving aid to the departed, both by offering on their behalf and obtaining prayers for them: for the common Expiation of the world is even before us.Saint John Chrysostom, Homily 41 on 1 Corinthians.

Mourn for those who have died in wealth, and did not from their wealth think of any solace for their soul, who had power to wash away their sins and would not. Let us all weep for these in private and in public, but with propriety, with gravity, not so as to make exhibitions of ourselves; let us weep for these, not one day, or two, but all our life. Such tears spring not from senseless passion, but from true affection. The other sort are of senseless passion. For this cause they are quickly quenched, whereas if they spring from the fear of God, they always abide with us. Let us weep for these; let us assist them according to our power; let us think of some assistance for them, small though it be, yet still let us assist them. How and in what way? By praying and entreating others to make prayers for them, by continually giving to the poor on their behalf.Saint John Chrysostom, Homily 3 on Philippians.

In these passages Saint John is asking his readers to pray for the dead, that through their prayers and works of charity the dead may be assisted in their purification in the afterlife. This, of course, sounds an awful lot like the Catholic Church’s doctrine of purgatory, which is rejected as “unbiblical” almost universally by Evangelicals such as Geisler.There are, of course, exceptions, including the Evangelical philosopher Jerry Walls, author of Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). If we set aside the biblical question, it is clear that if Saint John believed in purgatory (or at least some primitive understanding of it), he was not an advocate of the pristine “historic Christianity” that its champions claim had largely vanished from both the Western and Eastern Churches until the second decade of the sixteenth century.

There is a reason why Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman once wrote, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989; repr. of 1878 ed.), 8. As the contributors to this book began to encounter more non-Catholic accounts of Church history and doctrine that were similar to the one I sketched above, we began connecting the dots. We asked ourselves questions like: “If the so-called Catholic practices and beliefs rejected by contemporary Evangelicals were widely and uncontroversially practiced and believed deep in Church history by the very same people who gave us the ecumenical creeds and the canon of Scripture on which all Christians—Protestants and Catholics—claim to rely, why aren’t the ‘Catholic’ beliefs and practices just as Christian as the creeds and Scripture?” As questions like this began to accumulate, it became impossible for us to provide a coherent account of the origin and development of Christianity (that the early creeds and the fixation of the scriptural canon were guided by the Holy Spirit) while claiming that the “true meaning” of Jesus’ religion—“historic Christianity”, a sola scriptura faith devoid of sacraments, priests, bishops, and authoritative tradition—plays no visible or essential role in that development. It was clear to us that those practices, beliefs, and clerical offices that we would today say are “Catholic” were no less a part of the early Church’s doctrinal and liturgical mosaic than those beliefs we had thought were the entirety of historic Christianity.

In the chapters that follow you will be introduced, by way of their personal journeys, to some very impressive young men, all of whom are connected by their association with Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES) as either students or members of the faculty. You may be thinking: How is it possible that such an august group of Catholic converts can arise from one small Evangelical seminary in one geographical region of the United States over only a few short years? One of the reasons, and certainly a very important one, was the type of theological formation that drew many of them to SES. As is well known in the Evangelical world, SES founder Norman Geisler is a self-described Evangelical Thomist,Norman L. Geisler, Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Appraisal (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991). a follower of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274), perhaps the most important Catholic thinker of the second millennium. What Geisler found in Saint Thomas was a theologian whose views on God, faith and reason, natural theology, epistemology, metaphysics, and anthropology were congenial to his Evangelical faith.

Although Geisler, of course, rejects those parts of Aquinas’ thought that embrace distinctly Catholic doctrines, his love of the Angelic Doctor inspired his students to investigate Saint Thomas’ body of work with greater depth and less antipathy to Catholicism. What those students discovered is that Aquinas’ Catholicism was not some time-bound product of the medieval Church, but a wealth of theological insights in perfect continuity with his predecessors, such as Saint Augustine (354—430), and with his successors, such as those at the Council of Trent (1545—1563). What they also discovered is that one cannot easily isolate the “Evangelical-friendly Aquinas” from the “Dominican friar Saint Thomas.” There was no “historic Thomas” with “Catholic barnacles”. There was just Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic priest.

There was, however, more to the students’ being drawn to Catholicism than just accepting a collection of compelling arguments and historical insights. It was, as you shall see, about something alluringly Evangelical: following Jesus—but not as a conclusion to an argument, and not even as a “personal Savior”, as if we were nothing but a mere assembly of isolated souls, each with a free ticket to heaven, but rather as a living Lord whom we encounter in every aspect of his universal Church, which includes the Eucharist, the confessional, the saints, our penance, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Magisterium, our fellow parishioners, and the beauty and charity of the Church’s various edifices and institutions.

For this reason, as you read the stories in this wonderful collection, keep in mind the words of G. K. Chesterton: “When [the convert] has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside.”G. K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 49.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Francis J. Beckwith
Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies
Baylor University