By Brandon Dahm

And now that I am about to trace, as far as I can, the course of that great revolution of mind, which led me to leave my own home, to which I was bound by so many strong and tender ties, I feel overcome with the difficulty of satisfying myself in my account of it, and have recoiled from doing so, till the near approach of the day, on which these lines must be given to the world, forces me to set about the task. For who can know himself, and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him?
—John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua

In her poem “The Light of Interiors”Kay Ryan, “The Light of Interiors”, in The Best of It (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 242-43. Kay Ryan describes the transformation of light as it enters a home through windows, doors, and cracks and is altered by every surface as it makes its way to the home’s interior. Finally, the light coalesces into a glow that is the result of being “baffled equally by the scatter and order of love and failure”. This interior light, which has “an ideal and now sourceless texture”, cannot simply be traced to the picture window in the den or the skylight in the kitchen. Instead, every way that the home is exposed to the outside world and every surface in the home conspire to produce this seemingly preternatural light. I think Ryan’s beautiful description of interior light—and I apologize for the pun—illuminates conversion.

Reflecting upon his own conversion to Catholicism, Blessed John Henry Newman tried to provide an account of faith and persuasion that avoided the errors of a rationalism that reduces faith to inference and a fideism that denies the need for evidence and argument. Although Newman was clear that faith is a gift from God, he focused his analysis in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent on the human side of conversion. Newman cogently argues at length that conversion is not the result of a series of abstract, formalized arguments.See John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, chaps. 8 and 9. Instead, through a process of what he calls “natural reasoning” we come to believe as “the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities”.John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, pt. 3: “History of My Religious Opinions up to 1833”, 49-50. The convert has taken any manner of information from any number of sources, e.g., the historical argument for the Resurrection, a sense of purpose in life, the sacrificial love of his grandmother, guilt and the desire for forgiveness, the seemingly miraculous nature of the Church, the overwhelming beauty in nature, awe at the strangeness of existence, et cetera. Each of these experiences plays some role in our new believer’s conversion, yet he did not develop for each one a formal argument to judge the likelihood of the truth of Christianity.Newman argues further that attempting to do so would actually skew the evidence by removing the force of things in their concreteness. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, chap. 8, sect. 1. Instead, the streams of evidence converge and coalesce in such a way that each step cannot be made explicit, so that one cannot easily point out exactly why one now holds his new beliefs—which are like the interior light—with the conviction he does.

An unlikely team, Newman and Ryan complement each other well here. After conversion, a person can point out some important sources of light—the windows in the kitchen in the afternoon—but he cannot identify each source, for there are many small cracks, “loose fits, leaks, and other breaches of surface”.Ryan, “The Light of Interiors”, 242. After conversion, a person can identify points of intersection between some rays of light, but he cannot trace every convergence, reflection, and diffusion. Upon entering the inner chambers of the home, one can recognize the interior light without being able to explain exactly how it came to be.

When talking about my conversion, then, I can walk you into the kitchen and show you the casement window over the sink, or the picture window in the den, or even where some light gets in underneath the side door. We can then follow the light, and I can show you the hall mirror that reflects the light, the heavy carpet in the living room that dampens the light, and the point on the stairway where two sources of light converge. We can even talk about the light and what it is. Yet, even after identifying each of these lines of evidence and modes of convergence and appropriation, even after having an idea of what light is, I have not provided a complete account of how the interior light came to be. So please read this as a friendly tour of the light of a home instead of an exhaustive demonstration of what I now believe.

The Catholic Question

In college, when we would share testimonies, I remember being a little disappointed with mine. I do not remember a time when I was not a Christian, and I never had a conversion moment. Of course, there were many moments when things would take on new significance for me—the depth of Christ’s love, that I could love God with my mind, that only God could really satisfy my deepest desires—but I never had a dramatic moment when I repented and said the sinner’s prayer. Instead, being a Christian was always just part of my identity: we went to church, believed what was taught, and prayed. As I got older, I was encouraged to do Christian things independently of family activities and to make Christianity my own. This initially involved going to youth group and my school’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which provided opportunities to explore my faith.

One of the ways I began to appropriate Christianity further was to try to understand what I believed. Although I grew up Christian, I had little awareness of the deep theological divisions separating the types of churches I went to regularly with my family—Reformed, Methodist, and Baptist. In high school, the father of a friend and pastor of other friends introduced me to Reformed theology, and thereby theology in general. The prospect of giving a more precise and reasoned account of my faith was enticing, and I began to read things that I did not understand. I remember long conversations with my friends about end times and reading the Left Behind series with excitement. But this was just a taste of the Christian intellectual life that I would discover in college.

Although I had a natural and nurtured tendency to question and pursue answers, it was enhanced and focused during my first years at Iowa State. I was invited to a Bible study during my freshman year by an acquaintance from near my hometown. We had worked at a restaurant together and, despite being from rival towns, had hit it off talking hard-core rock bands we both liked. Someone else in the Bible study, who would also go to SES, Cambridge, and convert to Catholicism, had the apologetics bug and infected the rest of us. I realized that one of the things I loved about apologetics was the philosophy involved, so I switched my major to philosophy.

Because conversions involve uncountable slight adjustments in belief, desire, and understanding, it can be hard to find a clear and fixed reference point for my conversion. One decisive moment for me was when I realized I had to give the Catholic question—“Is Catholicism true?”—careful consideration. It happened during my sophomore year of college. A small group of friends and I had started a campus organization called—wait for it—Truth Bucket, in which we discussed Christian apologetics. Beginning with the law of noncontradiction, then arguing for God’s existence, and considering the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, we concluded that Christianity is true. Using some of J. Budziszewski’s work on natural law, I gave a talk on the moral argument for God’s existence during that first semester of Truth Bucket.

The comedian Jim Gaffigan does a bit in which he asks, “Who here has read a book that changed your life?” After a moment of silence, he says, “Yeah, me neither.” I love Jim, but this joke makes me a little sad. Since I began college, my life has consisted of reading one life-changing book after another. One of the first books in this category was Professor Budziszewski’s What We Can’t Not Know. It transformed the way I understood morality, psychology, and myself. My respect for Budzi (as we affectionately called him) only increased when he was generous enough to respond to the questions we e-mailed him. So, when I heard the news that he had become Catholic, I was concerned.

At the time, Catholicism was not even on my radar as an option. I grew up in a small Dutch town and wasn’t aware that I knew any Catholics. I didn’t have any animosity toward Catholics; they were just “other” (we visited a Catholic church on a school field trip to unfamiliar places of worship). And reading Norman Geisler, the cofounder of Southern Evangelical Seminary, had reinforced that Catholicism wasn’t an option. Although he affirmed that Catholics got a lot right, Geisler gave the impression that Catholicism was obviously wrong on the key disagreements between Catholics and Protestants. But, because I respected Budziszewski, I went straight to the source instead of just wondering why such an exemplar of intelligence and wisdom would convert. I e-mailed him with brashness that is painful to recollect and said something like, “I always thought it was more reasonable not to be Catholic than to be Catholic. So why did you convert?” Budziszewski answered my e-mail. He explained that the issues were many and complex, better suited to discussion than e-mail; so I called him, and he told me some of his story, answered some of my questions, and responded to objections I hadn’t even thought of. After that conversation, the Catholic question became something I had to take seriously.

We had started Truth Bucket, and we were in over our heads. Through the ministry we attended, we got to know an Iowa State and SES alum who was working on his PhD in philosophy. We had met him at a philosophy conference in our freshmen year, and our friendship and mentorship were solidified over the next couple of years as he guided us. He helped instill in us an ideal: to follow the truth wherever it leads (he thought Truth Bucket should have been called Truth Seekers). So, although we were not always charitable toward other points of view during those early years, we did have a noble goal. When the Catholic question arose, then, my habitual desire to pursue the truth wherever it led kept me from completely tossing the question aside.

It was not just philosophy in general that we were studying either. The apologist we read most was Norman Geisler, who was deeply influenced by the thirteenth-century Catholic theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas. Through Geisler, we became Thomists; that is, we took Aquinas as a philosophical guide. This meant that I had to respect Aquinas as a thinker, which required me at least to try to give his theology a fair hearing.

The light coming in was not exclusively intellectual light, though; I also made my first Catholic friends as an undergrad. One—Jeff—was someone I had known in high school. Jeff also made his faith his own in college, and I was lucky enough to be alongside him as he did; so my first experience with a Catholic was someone living his faith. About a decade later, I got to see Jeff ordained and celebrate his first Mass. The other Catholic I got to know was a Dominican sister who wrote a textbook on Aristotelian logic. I had written to her for help, and she wrote back explaining that I did not understand logic, which was true, and told me to stay close to Jesus. Sister Mary Michael Spangler and I continued writing, and she helped me a great deal in learning about logic and Aquinas. More importantly, her devotion was apparent, if implicit. I actually visited her convent, Saint Mary of the Springs in Columbus, Ohio, on the way to an SES apologetics conference during the year I took off after college.

During this time, one of the four Bucketeers (which we never called ourselves) moved away and started reading a lot of Catholic theology and spirituality. Whenever he visited us, we would have long discussions about what he had been reading, and the Catholic question would always get a little more serious. This culminated in an infamous conversation with my girlfriend—now my wife—Andrea. It was clear that our relationship was heading for marriage, so I thought she deserved to be warned that there was a real chance I would become Catholic. She cried. But she stuck around.

I took a year off after college to wait for Andrea to graduate but continued studying philosophy and theology. I also led a Bible study for some high schoolers, read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (which I will return to later), and worked full-time doing social work and then customer service. The drift toward Catholicism continued without any major developments. One major life event did occur, though: marriage. Two weeks after our wedding, Andrea and I were on our way to Charlotte, North Carolina, for me to start at SES and for Andrea to start work as a graphic designer.

Southern Evangelical Seminary

The transition into life in Charlotte was smooth. We had good friends at the seminary, my best friend’s parents lived in town, and Andrea worked with great people. We attended Southern Evangelical Church, the church attached to the seminary. Norman Geisler was the head pastor of the church, as well president of the seminary. We had a great social life, and I enjoyed school.

Through my coursework at SES, I changed my mind on issues centrally related to the Catholic question. First, I wrote a paper on the Catholic view of justification and grace for a systematic theology class on sin and salvation. Although I focused on Aquinas’ account, I saw that it was clearly of a piece with the Council of Trent and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I learned a lot. I learned that Aquinas clearly teaches that every step of salvation—justification, sanctification, and glorification in my Protestant division—is accomplished by grace. I learned that apart from grace—and the entire Catholic tradition is very clear on this doctrine—man can do nothing pleasing to God.Louis Bouyer shows this in The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, chap. 2. Justification is by grace, but I was convinced that it involves a real change in the person justified. Aquinas argues that justice involves a kind of equality between persons. Yet, we have sinned. So, through the infusion of grace that is justification, we are reborn friends of God. Justification changes a core part of our identity—from enemies of God to friends of God—and thus a core part of our being. Studying Aquinas’ theological and philosophical account suddenly illuminated scriptural passages about being reborn and being a new creation. Because he loves us, God, by grace—Aquinas and the Catholic Church argue—does not just declare us righteous but makes us righteous. I concluded the paper with the following:

Roman Catholicism is one of the major traditions within Christianity, and many aspects of their views concerning grace and justification trace back at least to Augustine. Understanding this view has at least three practical benefits. First, it helps me understand what our brothers and sisters in the Catholic tradition think, which helps me better understand and relate to them. Second, it gives me another historical Christian interpretation of Scripture to consider as I read and try to understand God’s Word. Third, the Catholic claim is an important truth claim that must be seriously considered by every Christian. It cannot be considered without being understood. To reject or refute it before understanding it is to decide the truth instead of attempting to discover it. This paper has been my first step in understanding the Catholic claims regarding justification.

In fact, through my research for the paper, I had been convinced of an important Catholic position.

During my second semester at SES I took Systematic Theology 1: Prolegomena and Bible with Geisler. The canon of Scripture was one of the class topics, so we spent time examining why the Bible contains the books it does. Geisler critiqued the Catholic canon, which includes a somewhat different set of books, and argued for why the Protestant canon is exactly right. Although I took the arguments against Catholicism on Geisler’s authority at the time, his positive case left me unsatisfied. I thought the arguments for the general reliability of the New Testament and the Resurrection of Jesus were good but realized I would need to examine the issue of the canon further.

Also during this time—I have no distinct memory of when or how this came about—I became convinced that Christ was really present at communion. I had not yet done a deep study of the history of the disagreement over Christ’s real presence (only a survey of views in one of my systematic theology courses) or seen any of the texts from Church Fathers talking about the Eucharist.Tim A. Troutman, “The Church Fathers on Transubstantiation”, Called to Communion, December 13, 2010, http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/12/church-fathers-on-transubstantiation/. Instead, I was convinced by John 6. Of course, there is debate about the meaning of this passage, but what else would Jesus need to say if he wanted to tell us something like the Catholic view of the real presence? I was convinced, but I was unaware of the historical connection of the Eucharistic celebration and apostolic authority,John D. Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop during the First Three Centuries, translated by Elizabeth Theokritoff (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001). its continuity with the Old Testament practices,Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist (New York: Doubleday, 2011). and the consequences of such a view (e.g., what do we do with the leftover bread and juice if it is truly Christ’s Body and Blood, and can just anyone say the words and transform the elements into Christ?). So I thought the juice and bread at my Presbyterian church were really becoming the Blood and Body of Christ during communion.

At this point, we had left Southern Evangelical Church (which devastatingly imploded due to an internal power struggle and never recovered) and were attending Lake Forest Church, north of Charlotte. The pastor at our new church was unapologetically orthodox but also incorporated the best parts of the emerging church movement. So the church started observing Lent and even prayed the Stations of the Cross. We participated in these ancient practices because we trusted our pastor. But since they, like so many Catholic spiritual practices, are embodied—incarnational—practices that incorporate one’s whole being, they began influencing my understanding of sanctification. Catholic spirituality continued to draw me in as my pursuit of sanctification became more tangible.

During my first year at SES, I found out about a summer seminar at Princeton on Aquinas’ view of natural law. I had been interested in natural law ever since reading J. Budziszewski’s What We Can’t Not Know as an undergraduate. Natural law theory is an account of morality that explains what is good for man in terms of his nature and how man “naturally” knows the basics about good and evil.For a good introduction to the history of natural law theory, see J. Budziszewski, Written on the Heart (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1997). C. S. Lewis talks about a kind of natural law theory when he discusses the Tao in The Abolition of Man. Although I was intimidated by the prospect of doing it on my own, I applied to the seminar and was accepted. So, in the summer of 2008, I spent two wonderful weeks studying natural law at Princeton. It was there that I made the connections that became my gateway to Cambridge University, where Andrea and I spent a year. But more on that later.

In addition to making some great friends and learning about natural law, I read Aquinas’ treatise on happiness for the first time. I may have skimmed through it before, but reading it for the seminar was a life-changing experience. Morality, virtue, love, faith, emotions, and happiness were all integrated into a cohesive view of life. God made us to enjoy perfect happiness—that is, a state in which all of our desires are fulfilled—through friendship with him. By God’s grace, we attain some measure of this happiness in this life through faith, hope, love, and other virtues, such as temperance, courage, justice, and prudence; through disciplines such as prayer and fasting; through concrete means of grace in the sacraments; and through friendships and contemplation. Yet, all of this is but a taste of what we will enjoy when we see God face-to-face in the next life.

At least this is Aquinas’ account, and I was taken with it. It offered a unity and intelligibility to my experience and beliefs that were satisfying, as things of great beauty and explanatory power are satisfying. And Aquinas’ view is an articulation that was then deeply integrated into Catholic theology. Consider the first sentences of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. (CCC 1)

Whether or not you are Catholic, that is a beautiful picture of reality.

The following year, I studied two thinkers who deeply affected my thinking: Gotthold Lessing and Alasdair MacIntyre. I heard about Lessing’s “ugly ditch” for the first time while hanging out after a student event. Lessing concludes a brief essay arguing for a chasm between apologetic arguments and Christian faith, “That, then, is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap.”Gotthold Lessing, Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 55. Although Lessing conflates at least three ditches, he identifies one problem that hit home for me.For an extensive treatment of the ditches, see Gordon E. Michalson Jr., Lessing’s “Ugly Ditch”: A Study of Theology and History (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), and Matthew A. Benton, “The Modal Gap: The Objective Problem of Lessing’s Ditch(es) and Kierkegaard’s Subjective Reply”, Religious Studies 42 (2006): 27-44. Even if arguments for the existence of God and Jesus’ Resurrection succeed, probable arguments that Christianity is true are not sufficient to ground Christian faith. I had been trained to think that faith was bound up with inferences in such a way that the arguments were what secured the faith. Lessing’s arguments showed me that faith requires more than just probable inference. Faith, unlike probabilistic inference, is an all-in kind of commitment—intellectual and volitional—that does more than track likelihoods.

At the same time, I was reading a book that surveyed the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most important philosophers of the last century. I had read his After Virtue during my year off, but the force of his project did not hit me until I read Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue by Thomas D’Andrea, my Cambridge professor. The relevant insight is that we are embodied, historical thinkers who come to problems with questions, concepts, and things we take for granted—all framed by where and when we live. We are not ahistorical angelic intellects that approach a question from the standpoint of pure reason. MacIntyre explains:

A person is confronted by the claims of each of the traditions which we have considered as well as by those of other traditions. How is it rational to respond to them? The initial answer is: that will depend upon who you are and how you understand yourself. This is not the kind of answer we have been educated to expect in philosophy, but that is because our education in and about philosophy has presupposed what is not in fact true, that there are standards of rationality, adequate for the evaluation of rival answers to such questions, equally available, at least in principle, to all persons, whatever tradition they happen to find themselves in and whether or not they happen to inhabit any tradition.Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1980), 393.

The upshot here is not any kind of relativism but a recognition of the fact that we are knowers and desirers partially formed by our setting. In other words, we bring ourselves to the table when we think about a question, and we need to reflect on what this means. MacIntyre forced me to confront my assumptions and consider whether I was justified in taking them for granted.

I began to examine what my Protestant tradition took for granted. One thing that helped me examine this question was the debate over the nature of justification that N. T. Wright’s work was causing at the time. Wright offered a powerful biblical argument for a view of justification that was generally Protestant but incompatible with Luther’s and Calvin’s views.N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2009). The nature of the debate and its appeals to the authority of Luther and Calvin made me realize how difficult it was to support adequately some of the doctrines I took for granted from Scripture alone. Even central doctrines such as the creedal accounts of the Trinity and the Incarnation are under-determined by Scripture.We see evidence for this when Bible-believing Evangelical scholars reject aspects of the creed. For example, William Lane Craig rejects aspects of the Nicene Creed. William Lane Craig, “Is God the Father Causally Prior to the Son?”, Reasonable Faith with William Lane Craig, October 22, 2007, accessed May 28, 2015, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/is-god-the-father-causally-prior-to-the-son. So I realized that a certain Evangelical-Protestant tradition had informed my reading of the Bible; I was often reading my theology into Scripture as much as getting it out of Scripture. Once I returned from Cambridge, this realization turned into a serious problem.

Cambridge

Through a series of very fortunate events, I was able to study at the University of Cambridge as a visiting scholar during the academic year of 2009 to 2010. I was part of a small group studying Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. The Summa is a massive work, and people rarely have the luxury of reading it from cover to cover, so we were very lucky to have the opportunity. Following the brilliant student of Aquinas, Étienne Gilson, we began with the treatise on faith, which is over halfway into the Summa. Here our professor, Thomas D’Andrea, stressed that, for Aquinas, faith is not an inference. On the human side, faith is assent, through an act of trust, to what God reveals. On the divine side, faith is an infused light by which we see the truth of what God reveals. Faith is not just a belief proportioned to the evidence, like so many of our other beliefs, but an acceptance of certain truths because God has told them to us. It is a participation in God’s knowledge. Pope Francis’ recent encyclical Lumen Fidei (The Light of Faith) captures some of the aspects of faith that reading Aquinas opened up to us:

In faith, Christ is not simply the one in whom we believe, the supreme manifestation of God’s love; he is also the one with whom we are united precisely in order to believe. Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes: it is a participation in his way of seeing. In many areas in our lives we trust others who know more than we do. We trust the architect who builds our home, the pharmacist who gives us medicine for healing, the lawyer who defends us in court. We also need someone trustworthy and knowledgeable where God is concerned. Jesus, the Son of God, is the one who makes God known to us (cf. Jn 1:18). Christ’s life, his way of knowing the Father and living in complete and constant relationship with him, opens up new and inviting vistas for human experience. Saint John brings out the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus for our faith by using various forms of the verb “to believe”. In addition to “believing that” what Jesus tells us is true, John also speaks of “believing” Jesus and “believing in” Jesus. We “believe” Jesus when we accept his word, his testimony, because he is truthful. We “believe in” Jesus when we personally welcome him into our lives and journey towards him, clinging to him in love and following in his footsteps along the way. (chap. 1, no. 18)

This understanding of faith spoke directly to the problems MacIntyre and Lessing had introduced. Although I still needed Newman’s account of natural reasoning (which I briefly explained in my opening lines) to understand this process better, things were starting to make sense.

The Summa Group was about evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants. So the first few months involved a lot of Catholic-Protestant dialogue, discussion, and debate. Through this debate, some objections were answered and some questions were clarified. One argument our professor gave especially resonated with me. After noting the passages in Paul and the Gospels that stress the unity of the church, he explained that it only made sense that God would institute some mechanism to provide the desired unity. The argument can be spelled out—What kind of unity? Why is there no unity? What counts as a mechanism?—but the point is that Catholicism provides a mechanism for the kind of unity the Church needs: at the very least, doctrinal unity regarding the essentials of faith and a canon of Scripture. I had read Protestant accounts of the canon and knew they were not promising. Now I began to realize that the prospects for a good Protestant account of a standard of orthodoxy were not good either. But this problem did not become acute until we returned to SES.

We attended a High Church Anglican parish that year at Cambridge. Although we were originally drawn in by the beauty of the liturgy, the liturgical rhythm of life and the Eucharistic heart of the Mass changed us. It became clearer and clearer that we were participating in something bigger, something we did not make. It is hard to overestimate the effect that year had on me. I have given examples of a couple of the larger rays of light and how they moved inward, but we had hundreds of conversations about things Catholic, directly or indirectly. Regarding some objections and questions, I can remember where I was standing when a shift occurred; regarding others, I only realized that something had changed. In any case, we returned to Charlotte with the intention of attending a Catholic church while I finished at SES and applied for PhD programs. We had no concrete plans to convert, but it was clear that we were moving in that direction.

Back at SES

When I returned to SES, a dilemma crystallized for me. There is some standard for orthodoxy—right belief—in Christianity; i.e., there are some doctrines that are heresies. Yet, I had been convinced that creedal doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, which are the standard examples of orthodox doctrines, ruled out certain other doctrines about the Godhead and the Incarnation, e.g., modalism and Arianism. But what was the standard by which we divided orthodox from heretical? There were only two plausible answers: sola scriptura (only Scripture) and Tradition.

The first is the Protestant answer: heresies are those doctrines that are not consistent with the essence of biblical teaching, or, in a word, sola scriptura. The problem, I realized, is that sola scriptura does not get us creedal Christianity. Although the creedal accounts of the Trinity and the Incarnation have a strong claim to be the best interpretation of Scripture, they are still probabilistic interpretations. In other words, if we want creedal orthodoxy as a normative rule for what Christianity is, then the Protestant answer doesn’t work. So, to retain creedal Christianity requires adopting an extrabiblical authority. Moreover, what determines whether a doctrine is essential to Christianity?

The same dilemma presents itself in relation to the canon. Evangelical Craig Allert concludes the following after his discussion of the canon in A High View of Scripture?:

I am not claiming that we should have no confidence in the canon we have, but rather that we should be aware of how we received the canon we acknowledge as authoritative. My point here is that a knowledge of the formation of the New Testament canon has implications for the way Evangelicals have understood the nature and function of the Bible in our own traditions. No matter how one looks at the history, it is difficult to maintain that the church had a closed New Testament canon for the first four hundred years of its existence. This means that an appeal to the “Bible” as the early church’s sole rule for faith and life is anachronistic.

   Further, we need to recognize the manner in which the various documents found their way into the New Testament canon. The assertion that these documents forced their way into the canon by virtue of their unique inspiration has little historical support. In our desire to avoid the corrupting influence of tradition, we have often missed the fact that the very Bible we claim to accept as our only guide is itself a product of the very tradition we avoid. I will not mince words here because no serious study of the formation of the New Testament canon can avoid the fact that the church had a great deal to do with this formation. The Bible is the church’s book, and as many of the fathers show, the church has the responsibility to properly interpret the Bible because this same church has formed it. . . .

   The Christian faith did not grow in response to a book but as a response to God’s interaction with the community of faith. The Bible must be viewed as a product of the community because traditions of the community provide the context in which Scripture was produced.Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 145.

So, we are stuck trusting the church. And if we already trust the early Church to formulate the canon we take as normative, by what principled reason do we distrust the Church on so much else: her nature as an authoritative teacher, that grace is sacramental, that justification is intrinsic, et cetera? My inconsistent trust in the Church became apparent to me. Newman makes this point regarding the balancing act the Church performed by clarifying the basic doctrines of trinitarian and incarnational orthodoxy:

The series of ecclesiastical decisions, in which its progress was ever and anon signified, alternate between the one and the other side of the theological dogma especially in question, as if fashioning it into shape by opposite strokes. The controversy began in Apollinaris, who confused or denied the Two Natures in Christ, and was condemned by Pope Damasus. A reaction followed, and Theodore of Mopsuestia suggested by his teaching the doctrine of Two Persons. After Nestorius had brought that heresy into public view, and had incurred in consequence the anathema of the Third Ecumenical Council, the current of controversy again shifted its direction; for Eutyches appeared, maintained the One Nature, and was condemned at Chalcedon. Something however was still wanting to the overthrow of the Nestorian doctrine of Two Persons, and the Fifth Council was formally directed against the writings of Theodore and his party. Then followed the Monothelite heresy, which was a revival of the Eutychian or Monophysite, and was condemned in the Sixth. Lastly, Nestorian-ism once more showed itself in the Adoptionists of Spain, and gave occasion to the great Council of Frankfort. Any one false step would have thrown the whole theory of the doctrine into irretrievable confusion; but it was as if some one individual and perspicacious intellect, to speak humanly, ruled the theological discussion from first to last. That in the long course of centuries, and in spite of the failure, in points of detail, of the most gifted Fathers and Saints, the Church thus wrought out the one and only consistent theory which can be taken on the great doctrine in dispute, proves how clear, simple, and exact her vision of that doctrine was. But it proves more than this. Is it not utterly incredible, that with this thorough comprehension of so great a mystery, as far as the human mind can know it, she should be at that very time in the commission of the grossest errors in religious worship, and should be hiding the God and Mediator, whose Incarnation she contemplated with so clear an intellect, behind a crowd of idols?John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Doctrine, 2, 12, 4; emphasis added.

I had never considered Newman’s point because I had never really studied Church history. I thought the creeds were just clear summaries of the biblical teaching. Newman here shows that there was a lot going on in the early Church and, especially since there wasn’t a normative canon yet, the Church was doing much more than just summarizing.

During this time, one of my friends requested that I explain why I thought something more than the Bible was needed. I wrote the following short essay (with some minor edits) to him as an explanation, which was deeply influenced by my recent reading of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Doctrine—one of the books that helped the above dilemma coalesce for me.

The Need for a Regula Fidei

Over the past year I have become increasingly convinced that a regula fidei (rule or standard of faith) other than the Bible is needed in Christianity. It has not been because of one argument or a distinct fact, but the intersection and confluence of many lines of thought. I will briefly explain six different, albeit related, lines of thought that manifest the need for a rule.

A note on what this is not trying to accomplish: I am not trying to demonstrate that there must be an extrabiblical regula fidei. Although I think the reasons I offer are supportive and persuasive, they are partial and not finally conclusive. I am also not concluding that Catholicism is true. Catholicism is, in my opinion, the most likely candidate for providing the needed standard.

Beginning with something that has been part of my experience of faith is the fact that I already accept an extrabiblical standard for what Christianity is. I have, and do, implicitly trust that the early creedal definitions of the Trinity and the Incarnation are normative. They tell us what Christianity is, and departures from three Persons in one essence and two natures in one Person are departures, in some way, from Christianity. Although I hold this, my Protestant principles cannot account for it. Granting that these formulations are the most reasonable account of what is taught in Scripture regarding Christ and God, there is undoubtedly room for other explanations. And this is why it took centuries to clarify the teaching. The topics are some of the most difficult possible, and putting together the scriptural claims into creedal formulations required great intelligence, patience, and conceptual ingenuity.

These are qualities possessed by few, with even fewer having the circumstances to use these gifts. If Scripture is all we have, then each person must study the contents of Scripture according to his own lights, determining what it is to be a Christian both theoretically and practically. Viewed historically, when the extent of the canon was not clearly defined (and was definitely not identical with the Protestant canon), many people were illiterate, and even if literate, access to the needed helps (lexicons, historical information, commentaries, et cetera) was minimal; this becomes an enormous hurdle that each Christian must face. Even today conservative Protestant scholars are reinterpreting fundamental doctrines like justification in light of recent historical discoveries (e.g., N.T. Wright). Without an extra-biblical standard, this flux will be interminable, leaving much fundamental doctrine tenuous. And we see this played out in the history of Protestant theology, where the motion is not toward agreement.

With this in mind, it begins to seem strange that we would be left without an extrabiblical regula fidei. Christ came and founded a Church, a communal life. We know from analogy with nature that when God creates something, he sustains it, especially something as important as his body. When we plant a vine, commonly used as a metaphor for the Church in Scripture, it is irresponsible not to provide the conditions for it to flourish. And to flourish, a vine needs to be both nurtured and protected.

A regula fidei protects the Church by pruning away the diseased parts and keeping the healthy parts away from disease. We are warned of wolves, false teachers, because they corrupt our minds and thereby our faith. Heresy can destroy and prevent faith, but heresy is often difficult to discern. Not every Christian, in fact very few Christians, are capable of avoiding heresy on their own through careful study of Scripture. Imagine reading the New Testament as a first-century Jew or pagan. Which of us would realize the creeds? We would end in error, which would hinder our relationship with the Truth. A rule prevents this. It protects us from dangerous falsehoods, from division from Truth itself.

The Church is nurtured by this extrabiblical standard because it allows us to progress to solid food. After rebuking Christians for being immature, only ready for spiritual milk instead of the solid food they should be eating, Paul says, “Therefore, let us leave behind the basic teaching about Christ and advance to maturity, without laying the foundation all over again: repentance from dead works and faith in God, instruction about baptisms and laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment” (Heb 6:1-2). But some of these are what each Protestant must figure out. Without a rule beyond Scripture, we are stuck with spiritual milk. The regula fidei nurtures us, allowing us to move on to solid food.

Vines, like people, stories, and ideas, grow in a direction, toward something. As historical, each of these is forced to develop, make explicit what is implicit in itself, respond to criticism and attack, and define itself against others. Christianity is similarly historical. Its seed was planted by Christ, grown by the apostles, and, by necessity, continued to grow. What Christianity is has not changed, but its meaning needed to expand. Thus, creeds were authored at the councils, defining what Christianity must mean in response to the myriad of heresies it was facing. Without a standard outside of Scripture, this growth is stifled. Instead of a communal life, it is left in a kind of stasis. Growth is prevented because we cannot get beyond the seed.

Let us make one last approach to the issue before concluding. The unity of believers is clearly a priority of Christ and the apostles. As I have argued above, Protestantism does not provide the means for Christians to be united. We see this borne out in history, and it is not surprising from the emphasis on individual opinion and the lack of an extrabiblical guide. If there is not a regula fidei, we are left with the incongruity that God, who desires the unity of his Church, left that Church without a mechanism to make this unity possible. Scripture alone is insufficient, and most of us know this by experience.Brandon Dahm, “The Need for a Regula Fidei” (2010).

In short, the problem is that there is nothing outside of Scripture to tell us what Christianity is. What is essential to our faith? Something must be, but this most important question is left without a clear answer if we are without an extrabiblical regula fidei. So I was faced with a dilemma: either I give up the normativity of the creeds for faith, or I give up sola scriptura. I never really considered abandoning the creeds a live option—I did not want a choose-your-own-adventure theology. Sticking with the creeds showed me that I already trusted the Church.

Although I have talked about how my coursework related to some of these changes, I have said very little about how SES fits into this story. This is because it had very little to do with my conversion directly. Of course, the proclaimed ethos of defending the historical faith, taking opposing views seriously, and looking to Aquinas for answers pushed me to take the questions seriously, but SES was not a safe place to explore these questions. People who had challenged the status quo had had problems, and taking the Catholic question seriously was definitely a challenge to the status quo. It was also clear to us who were considering Orthodoxy or Catholicism that most of the faculty did not understand either tradition well enough to answer our questions.

Although we knew we were going to go to a Catholic church when we returned to Charlotte, we visited our old church a couple of times. Only then did we realize how much we had changed while away. The music was still very high quality, the preaching was excellent, and the people were friendly, but it just was not church to us anymore. Sunday worship was now embodied in a certain kind of liturgy and centered on the celebration of the Eucharist. Participating in the historical liturgy had transformed us, and we knew the liturgical rhythm of life was something we would need from then on.

We primarily attended the Catholic parish near our house during that year but also attended a Greek Orthodox church with some friends who had recently converted to Orthodoxy. Eastern Orthodoxy was on my radar as the other Christian tradition that could ground the canon and the rule of faith. We really enjoyed getting to know Greek Orthodox liturgy and are happy for our friends who did become Greek Orthodox, but we decided that Catholicism had the stronger historical and theological claim for reasons I will not go into here.For a fair-minded history of Catholic-Orthodox relations that follows one issue from biblical times to the present, see A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque—History of a Doctrinal Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). A reliable entry point for understanding Eastern Orthodoxy is Timothy Ware’s The Orthodox Church (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). So we returned to the Catholic parish for the rest of the year.

On the spiritual-practice side, something really important happened to me that year as well. Our Catholic friends invited us to go to adoration with them. Eucharistic adoration is a time when the host is exposed—is visible—so that people can come pray in its presence. Remember, the Eucharist is not just a symbol but is Christ himself. So think of adoration as going to spend time with Jesus. My first adoration was a powerful experience. I read a little from Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island and spent some time in silence with Jesus. The following text from Saint John Paul II captures my experience of adoration:

It is pleasant to spend time with him, to lie close to his breast like the Beloved Disciple (cf. Jn 13:25) and to feel the infinite love present in his heart. If in our time Christians must be distinguished above all by the “art of prayer,” how can we not feel a renewed need to spend time in spiritual converse, in silent adoration, in heartfelt love before Christ present in the Most Holy Sacrament? How often, dear brother and sisters, have I experienced this, and drawn from it strength, consolation and support! Saint Pope John Paul II, encyclical letter Ecclesia de Eucharista (On the Eucharist in Its Relationship with the Church), April 17, 2003, no. 25.

Again, actually participating in Catholic spirituality gave existential confirmation of Church teaching.

Between finishing up at SES, applying for PhD programs in philosophy, and the uncertainty of waiting to see whether and where I would get accepted, it was a stressful year. Despite all that, we had great times discussing with friends the nature of faith and conversion. Baylor was one of my top choices, and I was very happy to be accepted. Although our years in Charlotte had been happy ones and we were sad to say good-bye to so many good friends, we were ready to move on from SES to the next phase.

Baylor

We love Baylor and have been very happy here. A big part of that is the philosophy program. It is full of brilliant and supportive people who have made studying here a pleasure. But another big part of our life in Waco, Texas, is the Catholic community we were adopted into. On our first Sunday here, a colleague and his wife invited us to go to Mass with them and have lunch afterward. We quickly discovered that, a couple of years before, they had been through the same process we were going through. With them and some other friends from Baylor we started attending the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy. The Extraordinary Form is the Latin Mass that was celebrated by most parishes before the new Ordinary Form was put into place around 1970.See Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum (July 2007), which explains why the Extraordinary Form is still celebrated. Although we began going for the community, we were drawn into the depth and contemplative nature of the Extraordinary Form.

I keep saying “we”, but I haven’t talked about my wife much. Although she had been along for the ride up to this point, she had mostly been forced to inquire through my inquiry. She would participate in discussions, meet with the priests, and go to Mass, but she just had not had the time, since she had a full-time graphic design job, to inquire on her own terms. Now, though, having moved to freelance, she had a lot more time to read. And read she did. When we arrived in Waco, she was at the point at which she did not really have any objections to Catholicism but had a lot of questions. So she set out to answer them.

I had been at a similar point for the last few months in Charlotte. I knew I would be leaving Protestantism and was pretty sure I would become Catholic. Yet, I had gaps in my understanding that I was uncomfortable with, and making this type of life change was intimidating. My first year at Baylor was a time for everything to settle in while I worked on school. I kept thinking, reading, and talking about Catholicism, and I kept getting closer. During my second semester, I realized that I already trusted the Catholic Church. When there was a question of doctrine or morals, I did not weigh the evidence on various sides and look for proof texts, but went to the Catechism first. At that point, I was still not convinced by the arguments for the Catholic side of one practical issue. I made a conscious decision to trust the Church, which was the first time I had done so on an issue with practical consequences that were not all desirable. It was freeing.

Although we had had many good Catholic friends at this point, we had never lived primarily in a Catholic community. In Cambridge we were too far from converting, and in Charlotte our friends were mostly either Protestant or in the process of becoming something else. At Baylor we found a Catholic community. I have already mentioned that fellow graduate students in the philosophy department took us to Mass our first week in town. During my second semester, we were invited into a SOCRG (the Super Official Catechism Reading Group—SOCRG), which met weekly around a meal, red wine, the Catechism, and a desire to live Catholic lives deeply and honestly. We also befriended a couple from Mass who became our confirmation sponsors. Although we were not yet Catholic, by being a part of these communities, we were living Catholicism from the inside in a new way we had not been able to. As I have mentioned, Catholic practice is incarnational. So, to understand Catholicism better, it was important for us to participate in Catholic life as much as non-Catholics could.

Sometime during Lent of my first year at Baylor, I realized I was ready to become Catholic. This did not happen through another inference, but through the realization that I trusted the Church and was ready to trust her completely. The interior light had formed. Before this, I had decided to wait for Andrea before converting because, judging by her trajectory, she was also on her way to becoming Catholic. It was definitely worth waiting to be able to enter the Church together, but I did not have to wait too long. Andrea decided she was ready in November. We talked to our priest, did catechesis with him, and became Catholic on February 10, 2013. We were received in the Extraordinary Form and had many friends and family and our wonderful sponsors there to celebrate with us. Maybe we are still in the newlywed phase, but being Catholic has been better than I even hoped. It is hard to explain the change in our mode of life. As my wife and I often say, it seems both barely and thoroughly different. Although Catholics have a reputation for living a life of rules and guilt, our experience (and the experience of many of our friends) has been that being Catholic is freeing. I do not have to build my own theology and way of life but can enter into the ordinary form of Catholic life and participate in the many devotions and practices that the Church encourages but does not require. The Church explains the clear boundaries of the Christian life and what is required and offers many other practices by which to become better friends of God. I do not have the space to expand on this, but the biggest surprise for me was how great confession is.

Although this has been fairly long, I have been able only to scratch the surface of my conversion. Converts are often written off through psychologizing by those who disagree with them. But if you have not carefully considered the reasons I have (Aquinas on grace, Newman on the development of doctrine, MacIntyre on traditions and rationality, the Catechism on the sacraments, Merton on the interior life, et cetera) and had similar experiences (gone to enough Masses to get past the strangeness and to understand what is going on, lived according to the Church calendar, prayed the Stations of the Cross or the Rosary, spent time with the Blessed Sacrament in adoration, et cetera), then be slow to think you are in a place to reject Catholicism. As Étienne Gilson says, “We must understand before we can criticize.” One thing I have heard from many Evangelicals who think carefully about Catholicism—including those who do not convert—is that they had many misconceptions about what Catholicism actually teaches. These issues are not quick fixes that you can read an article on and be in the know; they are turns of mind that are deeply but subtly different. Thus, they require time to understand and get hold of. So please, take the time and effort to understand what Catholicism is and why so many of your fellow students, colleagues, and friends have come to believe it.