By Travis Johnson

Introduction

As with many who have followed a path similar to mine, my journey to the Catholic Church has been long, burdened with uncertainty and risk, speechlessly frustrating, and, among other things, lonely. I have upset my mother, argued with my sister, disappointed friends, and caused my boss to wonder from which planet I had descended. Despite some common feelings, and occasions of poor judgment and brash and awkward interactions, my journey home has been good. God has protected and provided for my family. Our Blessed Mother has unmistakably arranged and given grace in seemingly impossible situations. The prayers of Saint Joseph and Saint Thomas, among others, have undoubtedly strengthened me in my work, given me courage and wisdom in my weakness and worry, and sharpened me in mind and word.

Let me begin by stating clearly that I do not pretend to know all the answers or claim certainty beyond faith’s prerogative. In many ways, my conversion to the Catholic faith rests upon that singular and indubitable fact, that it is faith—familiar to all yet enjoyed by few—that drew me and bound me to Christ and his Church. The story that follows goes back to the beginning, when I first encountered faith, and my ensuing struggle for certainty.

Foggy Beginnings

One of the troubles in telling my conversion story is being able to delineate its beginning. As an Evangelical, I always struggled, when asked, to identify when and where my faith actually began. Aside from occasions to “share my testimony” (a common exercise in Evangelical circles), it was not something I otherwise considered. My usual answer had something to do with my lying in bed one night, around the age of twelve, and saying a prayer. The content of this prayer was as vague as the event and in time would grow terrifyingly uncertain.

God only knows what arrested me in sleepless panic to consider the final destination of my immortal soul that night. The truth, however, is that I cannot recollect a day when I did not believe in the gospel, even before that hallowed night. Of course, what I believed developed and became more informed, but my faith, to whatever extent I understood it and possessed it, has always been an enduring memory. Along with my parents, my church played a significant role in the development and strengthening of my Christian faith. Whether it was my parents, my youth pastor, or my friends, I had tremendous influences throughout my teenage years who loved Christ, were devoted to the Scriptures, and genuinely desired for me to grow and flourish in the faith.

An Evangelical Upbringing

I was formed in the heyday of Evangelical Christianity. It was the ’90s, and Christian music sounded like popular music; Christian T-shirts were fashionable, in abundance, and proudly bestowed and adorned at all youth-group events. Youth pastors looked and often behaved like their youth; and most importantly, the good-looking girls from the local high schools attended weekly Bible studies and youth-group retreats.

The church I attended was a nondenominational Bible church. From the high premium placed on evangelizing the lost to the practical guiding mantra that “it’s not a religion but a relationship,” the church was a prototypical Evangelical church, and the youth group was invariably and indisputably on fire for God. The fire, burning hot and bright from those summer youth-camp bonfires, which were fueled annually by passionate worshippers, zealous evangelists, and the abominable and guilt-inducing collections of secular CDs and smuggled-in packs of cigarettes, freed and set hearts on fire for the upcoming school year and the harvest that lay before them. In short, Christianity was cool, cathartic, and convincing.

Anecdotal descriptions aside, these experiences were of significant benefit to my formation. Along with the steadfast devotion and guidance of my parents, those youth ministers, friends, and events, and even some of the unoriginal and rebranded clichés of pop-Christian culture to the movement, had, by and large a positive influence on my faith. I was exposed to Scripture and prayer and was taught to cherish them deeply through study and practice. The church and lay leadership, to their credit, did not just exhort us to build friendships, serve others, and perform frequent and varied acts of Christian charity but provided us with opportunities for regular demonstrations of good works and community-enrichment efforts. Through mission and service trips, and through countless hours sharing common life with my friends and youth pastors, my devotion to Christ grew.

Searching for Certainty

Not being able to pinpoint my conversion to Christianity was something that began to trouble me during these formative years. I suppose that it was for this reason, in part, that I had multiple conversion or “rededication” experiences as a youth. Not only was the lying-in-bed-one-night story foggy, but it became less certain as I encountered new ideas and began to meet others and hear of their experiences of faith and conversion. These stories seemed to be substantiated with clear demarcations of conversion and were always dressed in the certainty of a future heavenly prize. What defined the origin and core meaning of my faith and what I was told to be the imperishable seed of “saving” faith were foggy memories and subjective experiences whose reality I had often doubted. I began to question not only the validity of my alleged conversion moment and my sincerity at the time but even whether the moment had occurred.

Outside my inner subjective feelings, beliefs, prayers, memories, and whatever inherited or learned proclivities I may have had was deafening silence. The most important decision in life was a decision made in quiet darkness. Aside from a level of authority and trust that I had determined to allow, there was no one standing outside my mind and feelings whose declarations were authoritative and whose words carried the weight of certainty. The verification of and surety of my faith depended, in large part, on me and my own spiritual energies and knowledge. I suppose it would be like getting married in a dark room. The person officiating might be a priest or a bum off the street, but you would not be sure and you would not know whether there were any guests to ask.

During this time, and as a public profession of my faith in Christ, I received the sacrament of baptism. I was taught to believe that baptism was nothing more than “an outward symbol of an inward reality.” Although I was brought up to believe in the necessity of being baptized, this “necessity,” I later discovered, was merely superficial, certainly had no objective power, and thus possessed no causal relationship between the baptism event and my salvation or life of faith. The theology of baptism would come to play a significant role in the early stages of my conversion to the Catholic faith. Thankfully God’s grace is not bound by human ignorance. Regardless of what exactly transpired ontologically and spiritually that day, my baptism was, at the time, a watershed moment. For the first time, there were declarations and actions that were beyond me and to which I was submitting. There was concreteness and an audience to my profession of faith. Having silenced this interior doubt, I would eventually begin a journey that sought to silence all doubt of the Christian faith, at least my version of it.

Quest for Knowledge and the Road West

Despite having grown up in church and having spent a lot of time in Bible studies and at youth retreats, my knowledge of Christianity was shallow. I knew the general story of Scripture and was convinced that God loved me and wanted me to love others, and that was about it. Not bad, I suppose, but certainly deficient for someone whose faith in Christ was allegedly central to his life. With the encouragement of my parents, I decided to attend Ravencrest Chalet, a one-year Bible school in the mountains of Colorado. Or more accurately, I decided to attend the mountains of Colorado at a one-year Bible school. The choice was a no-brainer. I could flounder around in Northwest Arkansas, take community-college courses, and continue my job answering customer-service calls for Walmart, or I could live in the mountains of Colorado and study the Bible. Needless to say, I chose the mountains and Bible school over Walmart and college algebra.

My reasons for setting out on this solitary, western road were many. As I drove through Kansas, I remember feeling a rising sense of anticipation and excitement as I drew nearer to my mountaintop destination. This feeling was more than anticipation of the thought of seeing the Rockies slowly begin to rise in the sunset. It was a new sense of awareness and vision of the world that, I imagine, comes only as we experience those coming-of-age sort of moments. Those moments when our youth and all that we once were or considered important are momentarily forgotten as we gaze, perhaps for the first time, into that golden horizon of the future, which is bigger and more interesting than we once suspected.

As my horizon grew that year, so did my thirst for knowledge, for education, and, most importantly, for a greater understanding of my faith. That year of Bible school developed in me an earnest desire to attain an intellectual grasp of my faith, which had, by and large, been only an exercise in personal application. Up until that point, I figured, like many Evangelicals, that the Bible had been exclusively written for me and my life. I just had to read it, and then figure out how it applied to the current circumstances. I desired an understanding that could provide objectivity and surety that what I believed was capable of transcending worldly scrutiny and whatever confidence I had in my spiritual energies and past memories and experiences. By the end of that year, I had set my trajectory on pursuing deeper theological study and formal training, which meant seminary. Of course, no such direction and passion comes without, at minimum, a curiosity in books. Although I had seen books before, was somewhat familiar with the concept, and had actually read one in high school, I had never given them much attention. My curiosity in these storehouses of knowledge, ideas, and creativity would grow that year and in the years to come. They would eventually help to open my eyes to the glories of the Catholic faith as well as to the inherent problems with Protestantism.

Apologetics, Philosophy, and Confusion

Along the way I picked up an interest in Christian apologetics. The idea that one could provide intellectual arguments for the truth of Christianity appealed to my increasingly analytical mind and stubborn inclination for certainty. For this reason, along with my growing desire for theological training, I majored in philosophy in college. I had determined that studies in philosophy paired nicely with Christian apologetics and theology, and that spending three years encountering great minds and influential ideas would serve me well as I sought to engage and understand the greatest mind of all—the mind of God.

Despite the historical exposure and those maturing moments of faith, caused by intellectual nausea and spiritual anguish, my hopeful experience in philosophical study increasingly diminished and became disenchanting. If philosophy was attainment of the good life through the pursuit and love of wisdom, then I could hardly see how arguing the existence of the wall that I was banging my head against was related to or valuable to that end. Philosophy, as it was largely presented, seemed like nothing more than a mental exercise, intent only on solving riddles and logical conundrums, and thus, from my judgment, seemed altogether useless and was a project that I had no qualms about abandoning upon completion of my university studies and as I began to prepare for seminary.

Southern Evangelical Seminary

I enrolled in my first classes at Southern Evangelical Seminary in the fall of 2006, and it was a sweet breath of fresh air. My professors were smart, witty, and wise, and above all we shared a common faith and purpose. They spoke of truth and goodness as if they were real things, capable of being discovered, understood, and enjoyed. Most of my professors saw themselves as guides to life and the Christian faith, presenting deep philosophical and theological insights and questions whose answers were of paramount importance and consequence to all of life. Thankfully, these professors were never content merely to present ideas without providing the necessary tools for proper reflection and understanding. Many of them taught students to ask questions, pursue fair and honest reflection, uncover assumptions, and think soundly about faith and reality. Above all, they presented Jesus Christ as the singular and solid manifestation in which all truth and goodness was grounded.

Most of my time at SES was untroubled by questions of certitude of faith. Reason was on prominent display. No questions of theology or morals were left untouched by the power of apologetics and rational demonstration. SES’ stated version of Evangelical Christianity was right, and others were wrong, and there were, at minimum, three points to support the former and three points to argue against the latter. To be sure, there were mysteries of the faith acknowledged, yet most of faith’s contents were indubitable and rationally discoverable, so long as one had the proper metaphysic and employed the correct interpretation of Scripture. I slowly began to question some of these assumptions and would eventually become overburdened by the fact that it was ultimately up to me to determine what Christian faith was. Before these occurrences, there were things going on in the background that slowly began to shift my attention to the Catholic Church.

Evangelicals Evangelizing for the Church

Growing up in the Protestant South,A phrase popularized by Flannery O’Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South”, in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds. Sally and Robert Fitgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 191-209. I encountered very few Catholics and thus knew very little about the Catholic faith. I knew that Catholicism was a variation of Christianity that held beliefs different from those of us real (i.e., Evangelical) Christians and that many of its followers might not be “saved” and should therefore be evangelized just as ferociously as the neighbor across the street. In fact, the only theological encounter that I had had with a Catholic dealt with prayers to the saints. A teenage Catholic girl, whom I met on a mission trip, was defending the notion to a gang of us Evangelicals. I found the idea biblically tenuous and uninteresting. Saints were made only in heaven and praying to someone other than God seemed idolatrous. Of course, I was wrong, and ironically, this Catholic belief has featured prominently in my daily Catholic life. That the bodily death of a saintly man or woman does not restrict our communion and the saint’s prayers on my behalf speaks volumes of the eternal reality and transcendence of the Communion of Saints. Evangelicals, although they pray fervently for each other here on Earth, allow death to terminate communion and friendship and have unknowingly built walls around Earth so as to prevent heaven’s saints from getting in to continue their offering of prayers on our behalf. But I digress.

When I entered SES, Catholicism was therefore neither friend nor foe. For this reason, the introduction and indoctrination into Catholic thinkers and theologians was of little consequence when I arrived. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, was a name with which I was familiar but with which I had had very little interaction prior to SES. As odd as it sounds, his thinking would emerge as the dominant philosophical and theological approach of several SES professors at the time. Of course, by marrying oneself to Saint Thomas, one inevitably gets the whole family, which includes thinkers and writers such as Flannery O’Connor, G. K. Chesterton, Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Peter Kreeft, Eleonore Stump, Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, and many, many others. My interaction with Catholic thinkers and writers was unlike anything I had experienced among my Protestant brethren. These Catholics wrote deeply and profoundly about reality, God, Scripture, and Christian virtue and living, and their writings seemed always to be accompanied by a sober, clearheaded, and magnanimous devotion to Jesus Christ and his Church. Reading these Thomistic thinkers and Catholic scholars placed me in an unfamiliar yet pleasant world of Catholic thought and tradition whose story did not begin in protest. Yet, despite this near-unanimous fervency for Catholic categories and thought among SES professors and students, there was an assumption that, regarding our Evangelical traditions and beliefs and these Catholic thinkers, we could have our cake and eat it too.

This notion that we could take what we liked of Saint Thomas’ theology and discard the parts that were upsetting to our Protestant tastes grew increasingly suspicious during my time at SES. It seemed to me, at least intuitively, that this collective parsing of Saint Thomas was unfair, and perhaps even dishonest. To my knowledge, no one ever pointed out that Saint Thomas penned the Summa Theologiae, his seminal work, in dedication to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Immaculate Seat of Wisdom, and submitted fully to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and her teachings. How, I began to wonder, could this giant of Christendom and his great host of intellectual devotees be right about so many things—often providing the key to unlocking all philosophical and theological conundrums and difficulties—yet be fundamentally wrong about the most important things, such as the source of Christian authority and the nature of salvation? This oddity of SES would lead me to consider other oddities that went to the very heart of the Protestant movement.

To its credit, SES not only engendered in students an ardent passion for clear and orderly thinking about matters of Christian faith and scholarship, but they also rightly elevated Saint Thomas Aquinas, Church history,To provide historical support for his theological positions, Norman Geisler frequently cites Church Fathers and theologians within his four-volume theology book, which was the primary text used for systematic-theology courses at SES. This strategy seems to imply the importance of Church history as an arbiter of present beliefs. See Norman L. Geisler, Systematic Theology, 4 vols. (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2005). and the Bible, encouraging students to approach them with grave seriousness and to let unmitigated truth be the guide to all their actions and commitments. So, when I came face-to-face with serious questions regarding the cogency of my Evangelical Protestant faith, I sought to pursue those questions with honest reflection and with great concern never to allow my projects to compromise Sacred Scripture and never to allow the voices of Church history to be drowned out by twenty-first-century Evangelical Protestant assumptions and traditions. This pursuit I began near the end of my time at Southern Evangelical Seminary.

Sola Scriptura and the Consequence of Disunity

My pursuit of the cogency of Protestantism and conversion to the Catholic faith was a three-year journey. It was, I suppose, not unlike other conversion experiences. It did not come on the heels of a conclusion reached through theological inquiry and studies of Church history alone. Nor did I arrive at Rome through a moment of existential crisis that pushed me out the door and sent me rushing to find the nearest priest. I recall no event or argument, no epiphanies, no direct answers from heaven, and no manifestations that removed all doubt and provided certainty of the Church’s claims. My conversion was, by and large, a very normal, day-by-day encounter with questions, conversations, experiences, studies, and moments of prayerful pleadings for truth. While much of the intellectual wrestling found its form in reading authors who posed serious questions to Protestant assumptions, beliefs, and traditions, a fair amount of this wrestling was experienced and observed within the various communities that I was a part of during those years. Intellectual conundrums began to shift into real theological problems, whose disastrous consequences I would soon begin to notice in my church, myself, and within the Evangelical culture at large.

What began to act as a splinter in my mind was the indisputable disunity of Christians, which is no more evident than within the denominational system of the Protestant tradition. It became apparent to me that unity—one of the four distinctive marks of the Church and that for which Jesus prays—is not only absent within Protestantism but is fundamentally impossible to achieve due to the Protestant belief in sola scriptura. This intellectual puzzle of Christian unity and sola scriptura would be marked by events and discoveries that began to supply color and a live context to my thoughts, resulting in what I saw as serious problems in Christianity and the meaning and objectivity of my faith.

As I considered Christian unity and the source of Christian authority, I began to notice similarities between Evangelical churches and the American marketplace. It appeared to me that choosing a church was, for all intents and purposes, simply a matter of taste and personal preference. Protestant churches and the seemingly endless promotion of differences and offerings to interested parties and guests appeared to have more in common with the cereal aisle at the local grocery store than with that unified and Mystical Body established by Jesus Christ (Eph 4:4-5; Col 1:24). A theological commitment, an identification with a mission, the variety and offerings of church ministries and groups, the attraction to the personality and preaching abilities of the pastor, a preference for the style of music, comfortableness with the ambiance and physical layout, availability of coffee and pastries, a sense of shared social similarities and interests among parishioners, a vague and subjective appeal to individual needs uniquely being met, and many other factors were, it seemed, what drove people, including me, to choose which church to attend. It was a buyer’s market, and churches seemed more engaged in passive, yet strategic competition rather than in unified purpose and worship of Jesus Christ.

The idea of belonging and being a part of my church community at the time, therefore, grew increasingly artificial. I belonged to the church so long as I felt as if they wanted me there and so long as I was benefiting from the relationship, which again, was based on my preferences and my beliefs and their meanings. The notion of “church,” therefore, became confusing, unimpressive, and, aside from a cultural obligation, absolutely pointless for entering heaven’s gates. I grew weary not only of my choice but of even having a choice, for it was not simply a matter of choosing a church, but a matter of continuing to choose that church week after week, month after month, and year after year. Every Sunday, I left judging the merits of the service, and thus the church, according to my own theological scruples and preferences. I slowly began to wonder if I was creating Christianity in my own image. My answer would soon be answered in a conversation about the Protestant-sanctioned practice of birth control.

I had recently been considering the nature and practice of birth control and had concluded that it seemed at best imprudent and at worst, and according to the majority of Christendom prior to the twentieth century, a wicked sin. A friend listened patiently while I opined reasons for my growing aversion to this practice. My friend’s simple yet revealing response to me was that no one should be legalistic or too dogmatic about an issue such as birth control when there is no demonstrable biblical mandate against it. This response was perfectly sensible, given my friend’s commitment to the authorial primacy of Sacred Scripture. Despite this common response, I could not help thinking how odd it was that something that was once universally condemned by the majority of Christendom could now be a matter resigned to personal conviction. What else, I began to wonder, has shifted from universal acceptance and belief to mere opinion? What is Protestant dogma? What is Christianity? What is faith? Above all, who decides? I realized that the ultimate and final answers to all these questions lay in one source: me. Due to sola scriptura, dogma is whatever is dogmatic for the individual, Christianity is whatever is deemed acceptable and believable by the individual, and faith is ultimately a submission to one’s predetermined beliefs. This discovery showed me that the faith of my fathers and their fathers was not a faith that had been passed on and received, but rather a mere version of it. What the older generation believed as being inseparable from Christian belief, including matters of grave sin, now bore the reproachful labels of “being legalistic” or “too dogmatic.” I could only conclude that it was, at least for now, the individual, modern science, and the ever-burgeoning pace and progress of twenty-first century life that bore the influence and final determination of the “faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). I had come to a place where I had not only lost meaning and objectivity, but also Christianity. If I were to retain my Christian faith and live it honestly and authentically, then I had no choice but to abandon my self-made religion and the meaning that I gave it.

By this time, I had abandoned all hope in Protestantism. To be sure, there were other areas familiar to and fundamental to Protestantism that I had discovered to be rationally implausible and incompatible with both Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers. Some of these areas have been addressed in detail in the appendices. My attention began to shift away from Protestantism to Catholicism. As providence would have it, I moved within three blocks of a Catholic church during this time. Soon after, and on the sage advice of my father, I began to attend daily Mass. My father, a committed Evangelical and faithful man of God, knew that for my questions to be answered and a sense of God’s direction to be heard, I needed to “go, and experience it.” So I went, not as a distant observer, curious about rites and rituals, but as someone who, upon entering for the first time, sensed the presence of something deeply real and transcendent.

I attended Mass many more times after that. I also began meeting and talking with the parish priests. Their profundity and clarity of Catholic doctrine was matched only by their patience and grace as they sat hour upon hour listening to a near total stranger. I recall one conversation with Father David Miller, a priest at the local parish and someone whom I would eventually come to know as a friend. After listening to my fears regarding the possible consequences of my conversion, such as the loss of my job, a fractious relationship with my parents and other family members, and most of all, leading my own family down the wrong path, Father Miller reminded me of two things. He first spoke of God’s love. He told me that God loved my wife and my children more than I ever could or imagine, and that whatever is chosen, even if in error, is incapable of quenching God’s love. Secondly, he reminded me that the possibility of suffering and hardship should never be used as an excuse for disobedience, and that whatever path I chose, it must be chosen by compulsion in obedience to the truth. These were the prayers that carried me during that final year before my conversion. I prayed that God would protect my family. I prayed that God would stop me if I were moving in the wrong direction. Finally, I prayed for the courage to follow truth no matter its leading or its cost. By the following year, my journey was complete. Truth had called me home to the Roman Catholic Church.

Receiving Christ’s Church and His Body

One year before my journey began, five years ago, a friend and I decided to go to a Catholic Easter Vigil Mass at Saint Patrick Cathedral in Charlotte, North Carolina. I suppose we went out of curiosity. After all, we were both studying in seminary and we were encouraged to be curious about, to investigate, and to seek understanding of things and ideas with which we were unfamiliar. So we went. I write we “went,” but in reality we were drawn. Of the many Catholic churches in Charlotte—and several, at that time, would have been just as convenient for us to go to—the church we attended would play a significant part in our lives.

Three years later, on June 29, 2013, at Saint Patrick Cathedral, my friend and his wife would be received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Later that same day and just a few feet from where my friend and his wife had become Catholic, my infant daughter, through the sacrament of baptism, would become the first member of my family to become a member of Christ’s visible and unified Church on Earth. On the feast of Christ the King, November 24, 2013, my wife and I would join my daughter as we were finally received into full communion with the Holy Roman Catholic Church. And it was at Saint Patrick Cathedral that I finally received the meaning and objectivity of my faith: Christ himself. I received not a symbol or an idea or a promise but Christ’s Body and Blood. It wasn’t something that I had attained through reason, nor was it something that I had determined to be true on my own. It was the mystery of the Church and the mystery of the Christian faith. It was Christ himself, drawing me finally to the banquet of his Body and Blood and to a real faith—a faith that acknowledges and receives, by faith, what has been handed down through the Catholic Church, beginning with Peter and the apostles. It is a faith that does not first ask for my understanding or promise rational certainty. It is a faith that submits to Christ and to the authority of his Church, the Roman Catholic Church, no matter the cost.