By Jeremiah Cowart

Unimpressed with Religion

First, let me say that at this moment in my life, I am quite impressed with various religions as a whole. Of course, I am most impressed with Catholicism, but that was certainly not always the case (more on that in a minute). During my undergraduate education, I assimilated a certain intellectual value, and this value would guide and define much of my intellectual development in the ensuing years. One of my favorite philosophers, Aristotle, apparently said (though I have never found where he wrote it), “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”This quotation is often attributed to Aristotle. It most likely is a discombobulated quotation from Nichomachean Ethics, book I, 1094.b24. And in a similar vein, my Evangelical mentor, Norman Geisler, said that before you ever have the right to criticize another point of view, you must do two things: understand that point of view and learn something from it. These are indeed wise words, and I believe I will take these Aristotelian and “Geislerian” philosophies of intellectual engagement with me to the grave. I believe these underlying principles helped ease my transition into Catholicism in 2004, though I really never saw that “conversion” coming.Of all my extended family that I have known, none have been Catholic.

When I was an Evangelical Christian, I noticed that many of my fellow Evangelicals looked for a “defining moment” in their respective spiritual journeys toward God. There is a widespread belief among Evangelicals that there is a specific moment when they know they have committed themselves to Christ (have been “saved”). For many Evangelicals, this moment comes in the form of making a public profession of faith in Christ in the presence of witnesses (think Billy Graham crusades). In strong contrast to this, I have noticed in my religious experience that there were many defining moments spread out over several years that, when taken together, amounted to a full acceptance that Catholicism is the best path to God that this world has to offer. What follows below is an attempt to retrace some of the more significant defining moments in my religious journey. I hope it will be a useful story to some readers, if not slightly interesting as well.

I once heard Peter Kreeft give a lecture with the not-so-modest title “Why Should Everybody in the World Be a Roman Catholic?”Peter Kreeft, “Why I Am a Catholic”, 7 Reasons with Peter Kreeft, five-part lecture series, Lighthouse Media, November 12, 2011. This lecture can be found on YouTube under the title “Why I Am a Catholic—(7 Reasons with Peter Kreeft)”. Kreeft proceeds to provide the audience with seven reasons. In that lecture, Professor Kreeft said that most people who begin to believe anything about religion do so in the most natural way possible—they pay attention to their parents. If their parents are living a good life, children tend to grow up adhering to very similar religious beliefs. I suppose that was more or less my experience. I was raised in a home that was not unfriendly to religion, yet not overly encouraging of it either. My parents never openly disparaged religion or religious folks, yet we could hardly be called a churchgoing family either. My folks were very much children of the 1960s, fairly typical baby boomers who were influenced by the New Age hippie spirituality that defined much of that era. (The religious reading material in my childhood home consisted of random Carlos Castaneda works, for example.) So even though I grew up in the Bible Belt, we weren’t the type of family who attended church (not even the type who attended on Christmas and Easter just in case it all turned out to be true).

And yet, at certain times throughout my earlier childhood, I did occasionally attend Vacation Bible School with friends. Sometimes I went to a religious service when I stayed with my aunt Susan, who had given me two Bibles while I was in elementary school: a Gideon pocket New Testament (which I have to this day) and a King James Bible (which fell apart long ago, though not because of frequent use). The deepest philosophy I was exposed to as a young adolescent was probably in the Marvel comic books that I consumed. What I am getting at is that I had little exposure to Christianity as a child. And if I were to guess the impact of this upbringing on my attitude, I would say that my lack of exposure just left me unimpressed with religion as a whole.

The “Church of God”

But in 1992, when I was a sophomore in high school, my older brother and my mom simultaneously became very interested in Christianity. They may have even had their own defining moments; I’ve never asked. My mother got so excited in her newfound zeal that she bought me a humongous study Bible (New International Version). It was a much easier translation to follow than the King James Bible, which meant that I might have read a little of it. But nearly every night, my brother would ask me if he could borrow my NIV Bible to read from. I always said yes because, although I did not want to disappoint my mother, I was not using it. But by the time I was sixteen, my mother and my brother had developed an ardent desire to follow Christ and learn more about his teachings. My brother did this in a mostly private way, through Bible study. But my mother had found a home in the nearby Mount Paran Church of God in Marietta, Georgia.

So there I was, doing nothing of particular interest in my teenage years, but my family was becoming passionate about religion. I didn’t really want the train to leave the station without me on it! (I think my father felt the same way too.) I figured that my mom and my brother might have been on to something, so I took Pascal’s Wager without realizing I was doing so. I began to do a little Bible reading (and church attending too). My mother had always been a singer and even managed to get me involved in the youth choir at church. This series of events culminated with my family firmly in the grasp of one Evangelical denomination: the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee). We all made public commitments to Christ in the early ’90s. I think I was baptized too (though I do not remember much besides the teenage awkwardness of the moment and getting fully immersed in water).

But what was important about all of this was that my family was plugged into a vibrant Christian community for the first time. This community was not without its fair share of oddities (e.g., speaking in tongues, laying on of hands to heal bodily sickness, lots of folks crying with hands raised to heaven), but it was active and engaging to me as a young teen. I joined the youth group and became acquainted with some of the most passionate people I had ever met in my young life. These teens would challenge me about my personal “walk with God” and ask me whether I had been “saved” or had received the “gift of the Spirit”, which referred to speaking in tongues, I think. And they would do so in a quasi-confrontational manner. To be honest, although I appreciated their passion for God, they often made me uncomfortable. I do not think their passion made me uncomfortable, but their in-your-face expression of that passion made me not want to be around them much. But again, I did not want to miss the boat to heaven, so I continued on with the youth-group stuff until high school extracurricular activities got in the way.

In my junior year of high school, I befriended a classmate who had been a part of the Mount Paran Church of Atlanta from his early childhood. I had no real plans for college, so this friend persuaded me to attend college with him in Cleveland, Tennessee, which was the hub for the division of the Church of God of which Mount Paran was a member. (I had been surprised to learn that there were other Church of God denominations within the United States, besides the one based in Cleveland. Perhaps this was my first glimpse into one of Protestantism’s main oddities—the plague of denominationalism.) So, in 1994, my friend and I headed off for our freshman year at Lee College,Now Lee University. a Church of God institution of higher learning. That college was vibrant and welcoming in the same way that my church had been. It was an active, loving community, full of in-your-face Christians who did not mind continuing to make me uncomfortable.

During my freshman year at Lee, two remarkable things happened. First, I met two fellow freshmen who were avid Bible readers and very passionate about their Christian faith. They befriended me right away, and their friendship felt significant. I guess they both seemed somewhat “holy” to me, in a way that I had not experienced in other people. They challenged me to read the Bible more and to pray spontaneously more often. It was largely because of their influence that I read all of the apostle Paul’s epistles that year (1995). And as I read, I noticed a recurring theme that Saint Paul simply hammered into his audience, and this theme would stick with me for years to come. Saint Paul repeated that the Church is the “Body of Christ”. I do not know if I ever counted precisely how many times Saint Paul said this, but it was often enough to strike me as an overt repetition in his writings. He wanted the reader to bring this idea home and grasp it firmly: the Church is Christ’s Body. I was not exactly sure what that expression meant, but I was reasonably sure that it meant that the Church was one, as in unified. It was one thing as a body is one thing. Apparently it was alive too.

Something else important happened to me while at Lee, and this experience would set the groundwork for the rest of my religious life. A friend of mine at Lee challenged me to read the entire (Protestant) Bible. I eventually read the Protestant Bible through in one year, following a chronological plan to cover three to four chapters every day. It was a painstaking task, but in 1997 I finished it. And I have to say that was easily one of the most profoundly religious experiences of my life. It completely revolutionized my Christian thinking, especially regarding the Old Testament. I began to recognize continuity that I never knew existed between the two Testaments of the Bible.

Being at Lee was an overall positive experience, but I stayed only one year. I ran out of the requisite money to attend an out-of-state private college, so I went back home to Georgia. For the next decade or so, I attended many mainstream Protestant churches, both progressive and conservative Evangelical churches. I tried out Presbyterian, Baptist, various Pentecostal, Lutheran, Methodist, and so on. I was always looking for “the real Church” (this Body of Christ that Paul spoke of). I never seemed to find it, although I am not even sure what that meant to me at the time. I was not very sure what I was looking for. Part of me just thought I would recognize it when I experienced it.

One of the strategies I used to find the true Church was to apply various tests during my searching. For example, I would ask myself whether the doctrinal statements of this or that denomination lined up with what I understood “biblical truth” to be. If it did, I would attend services for a few months and see how the worship experience was, whether there was an inclusive and strong sense of community, et cetera. And above all that, I was looking for something grand, a church that was much larger than me and my small world. I had a sneaking suspicion that the Body of Christ was global in extent. So I would ask myself why the true Body of Christ would be exemplified by the Southern Baptists. If it were, that would imply that Christ’s Body on Earth is more or less confined to the Bible Belt. What kind of sense would that make? Or why would it be embodied by the Presbyterian church in America, as if the United States had a hold on proper religion? None of that made any sense to me. Besides all this, I never felt at home anywhere I went to worship. I guess this feeling was my most subjective test. But since I had recently read through the whole Bible, I wondered why the worship experience of the Jewish people, as recounted in the Old Testament, had little or no convergence with the worship found at Protestant churches.

Continuity

The Old Testament Hebrews worshipped via a heavy liturgy, one that was articulated to the very last detail within the pages of Sacred Scripture. Community prayers and community worship were routine for the Jewish people, and family was everything to them. In the Old Testament, I read about devout women and men giving the highest praise to God for giving them children. Children were, in the Hebrew mind, among the greatest blessings to come from above.When I read this and discussed this fact with my wife, we decided to stop using birth control. This was one incremental step leading us down a path toward the Catholic Church (unbeknownst to us, of course). God was also described as being intensely immanent in the world and deeply concerned with the affairs of his people. The Jewish people had a priestly class to handle worship and the sacrifices for sin. God spoke to his people largely through the priests and prophets. And there was no shortage of interesting-sounding statues, fabrics, candles, et cetera, all within the worship area itself. It sounded like a truly aesthetic and powerful experience to enter either the Jewish Tabernacle or the Temple.

I absorbed this picture of Old Testament life into my mind and heart and naturally asked why Protestant churches bore so little resemblance to that Old Testament experience. I wondered why the same God would make his worship experiences today be so vastly different from those of three thousand years ago. This was just another thing that made no sense to me. Where did the priests go? Where did the liturgy go? Where did the beauty go?

Reading the Bible laid all the groundwork I needed to become Catholic. It is difficult to retrace all the particular steps that eventuated in the road that led to Rome. But it was mostly a series of baby steps, I think, which all culminated in my realization that I was quite Catholic in my heart and mind, even years before the actual conversion took place.The word conversion is a bit of an overstatement, of course, since I was already a baptized Christian many years before I was confirmed Catholic.

John Henry Cardinal Newman once quipped, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” I do not know that I can honestly say that I was ever deep in history. But majoring in philosophy at the University of Georgia did expose me to the grand history of philosophical thought. It also helped to make me a lifelong fan of the virtue ethics of Aristotle. Then I attended graduate school at Southern Evangelical Seminary, which praised and promoted the teachings of some of the largest minds of the Church prior to the Reformation. The more I was exposed to the writings of Saints Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (not to mention Blessed John Duns Scotus), the more keenly aware I became of how different “church” was for those folks than for me. There was the strongest contrast imaginable between modern-day American Evangelical churches on the one hand and the ancient faith on the other. And when I say “ancient faith”, I mean both the ancient Jewish faith and the ancient Church. I saw then, and have seen more clearly every year since, the continuity that exists between ancient Judaism, early Christianity, medieval Catholicism, and the modern Catholic Church. In fact, continuity in an important way defines the Church. Or, perhaps more accurately, continuity defines how God interacts with his people over time. There is an underlying identity to the Church that has existed over these last two thousand years. You can find this identity by paying close attention to the continuity—the sameness of the Church over time.

Catholics recite the Nicene Creed during every Sunday Mass and confess together, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” The true church is everywhere, meaning it is catholic (universal). And of course it would be, would it not? It would not be largely confined to a certain country or region. It would be global in extent and influence, just as the Catholic Church is. Holiness (being set apart) would define the true Church. One would expect to see lives entirely devoted to God (monks, nuns, and clergy). One would also expect the Church to be somewhat holy herself from the wider culture around her. The true Church on Earth would certainly speak the truth about God and with the authority of the apostles. It would be apostolic, in other words. Even from my earliest teenage years, when I was just flirting with Christianity, I believed that the Church would speak the truth about God. Of all things the Church must possess, truth is a big one. Finally, just as Saint Paul used the analogy of the body to describe the Church, I knew that the true Church had to be one thing, not many separate and divided things. Specifically, the Church must be one organic thing, alive, just as Christ (who is her head) is alive.

In my heart and mind, I always believed the true Church on Earth would be unified, apostolic, universal, and exhibiting holiness. I do not think I would have expressed it this way. But thankfully that work of finding the right expression to describe the true Church was not a responsibility left to me. It resided with the bishops of Nicene and Constantinople in A.D. 381 and has been handed down to posterity. During my search for the true Church, I did not always clearly know what I was looking for, but when I found that the ancient Christians believed that their Church was one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, I had an “aha” moment. That is what I had been looking for all along, the Church with those four marks. I cannot say with all candor that that is all I have found within Catholicism, but I can say that Catholicism has the right formula for producing these four marks. At any rate, I see no other real contenders for the job, besides Eastern Orthodoxy perhaps.But with all due respect to our Orthodox brothers and sisters in Christ, where is the catholicity of Orthodoxy? How does Orthodoxy exhibit universality throughout the globe? And what about apostolicity? Did God stop communicating with his people through the bishops when the Great Schism happened a millennium ago? I must give it to the Orthodox, though: they do extremely well at exemplifying unity and holiness.

Discontinuity

So what about all the many non-Catholic churches in the world? Sadly, I would have to say that discontinuity is the word that best describes Protestantism and the faiths to which it has given rise. Protestantism has enormous problems with incoherency too. The problem of canonicity is enormous and likely insurmountable for my Protestant brothers and sisters. The oft-repeated Protestant quip about the Bible being a “fallible list of infallible books” never made any sense to me. If the list itself is fallible, then of course you have no idea which books should or should not be in it. It is an incoherent explanation of the biblical canon.

I have also never understood the Evangelical Protestant emphasis on the doctrine of sola fide because the “saved” inevitably do good works anyway. Being saved and doing good works are inexorably linked, according to most Protestant expressions of sola fide that I have come across. Now, I do not mean to belittle these doctrinal distinctions of Protestantism. They were and are important means of division, which is really just another way of pointing out Protestantism’s discontinuity with what came before it (Catholicism and Orthodoxy). And the discontinuity of Protestantism really made me see it as a remote chain of islands, all on their own, surrounded by water as far as the eye can see, and not well stocked. It reminds me of the film Cast Away. Spiritually, you can survive within Protestantism, but how well you will thrive depends on what is on the island of your brand of Protestantism.

Protestantism has (rightly or wrongly) been described as a “religion of the book”; that is to say, the Bible is considered the nucleus of Protestantism, and very little else is considered relevant or part and parcel of Christianity. In the average American Evangelical Sunday service, there is a little singing (either of hymns or modern praise songs) to begin with, generally followed by a short Bible reading, followed by forty-five minutes of biblical teaching, which we all hope is somehow related to the Scripture we just heard. And that pretty much sums it up! Anyone acquainted with ancient Judaism, early Christianity, or the Church of the High Middle Ages would be left desiring much more. Where is the liturgy? Where is the real presence of Christ with his people? Why are the ancient prayers and creeds not recited, as they had been for centuries before? Why does the God of the Old Testament so little resemble the Protestant understanding of the God of the New Testament? Why are we not publicly and privately confessing our sins? Why are we not doing an enormous amount of reading from the Bible, instead of reading a line or two and having someone explain it to us for an hour? Where are the aesthetics? Does a plain cross have aesthetic value? How do I know that the pastor up there is teaching what the Church has taught throughout the ages? Maybe that teacher up there is just teaching some fad that is popular today. How do I know that he is any more of an expert in the Bible than I am? Again, think Cast Away—Protestantism is paltry, and this paltriness just kept me searching for something more.

Now, do not get me wrong. There are beautiful Protestant churches around (e.g., Episcopalian). There are churches that hold to some liturgical traditions too (e.g., Lutheran, Missouri Synod). But for the most part, discontinuity with history is what defines Protestantism, and more especially American Evangelicalism. This was my opinion anyway, as I attended various churches in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area during my years at Southern Evangelical Seminary. Each church seemed like its own island doing its own thing, with very little to connect it to the other islands (other churches), let alone to the mainland (the historic Church through the ages). And each time I visited a new Protestant church, I had the inescapable belief that there just had to be more. Something was missing. Maybe many things were missing.

To Be Shallow in History Is at Least Something!

I do not know how deep in history one has to be before he ceases to be Protestant. But for me that happened sometime in 2002, toward the end of my seminary experience. There was a friend who helped nudge me toward the Catholic Church. (Well, he gently pushed me, really, but I am forever grateful that he did.) I do not know whether I would have gotten there so quickly without his help. (When I met him I was beginning to lean toward Eastern Orthodoxy because I was so fed up with the insufficiency that was Evangelicalism!) In the summer of 2004, just after the birth of my youngest boy, my children and I entered the Catholic Church. All four of my young boys were baptized into the Church at that time. I had my first confession, received my first Communion, and was confirmed in the Catholic faith. It was the highlight of my spiritual journey, a journey that seemed to take an eternity. But, hey, better late than never, right?

And since then I have never looked back. Peter Kreeft wryly noted that Walker Percy once explained that whenever he was asked why he was a Catholic, at least one answer was, “What else is there?”Walker Percy quoted by Peter Kreeft in “Why I Am a Catholic”, 7 Reasons with Peter Kreeft, five-part lecture series, Lighthouse Media, November 12, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAu5VL6mImA. That is how I came to view the whole matter too. If a person willingly goes through the difficult and wonderful, burdensome and glorious, task of being a Christian at all, really what other way is there to do it besides the Catholic way? I found that the Catholic Church is the one place you will find those four marks contained within our ancient and universal creed. All the many denominations I had tried over a span of ten years left me feeling high and dry. I came to see that there is no other way that will not leave you feeling deeply unsatisfied. I once heard Scott Hahn say that being a Protestant is like having the menu without getting the meal. Catholics have the menu and the meal. The Catholic Church is not perfect, as we all know (nothing with human intervention, short of inspired Scripture, ever could be), but by the grace of God, I became convinced that Catholicism is the fullness of the Christian faith. Walker Percy was right. God’s grace saves us, but also, what else is there?See Walker Percy, interview by Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, conducted by mail from May to October 1986, Paris Review, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2643/the-art-of-fiction-no-97-walker-percy.