By Andrew Preslar

What follows is the story of how I became a Catholic, as best as I can remember it. Only the first section is predominantly autobiographical. The next four sections are devoted to describing the contours of the biblical, liturgical, and ecclesiological considerations that would lead me to Catholicism. In the sixth section I recount the final steps that I took toward and then into the Catholic Church, including the process of navigating through some of the confusing and troubling aspects of her recent history. The concluding section contains a synopsis of the development in my views on salvation and how this relates to the liturgical life of the Church.

Searching for Holy Ground

My father is the cofounder and head pastor of an independent Bible church in Charlotte, North Carolina. In our family, “the church” meant both this particular community of believers and, eventually, the place where our religious services were held. Our theological doctrine of the church involved a different and more inclusive definition of the term, but the church in this wider sense was something so abstract that for all practical purposes and in regular conversation “the church” simply meant our church.

In the early days, we gathered for worship in the home of one of the church elders. (Our polity was Presbyterian, though doctrinally and culturally we were closer to Baptists.) As the church grew, we moved from this house to various rented locations and eventually began making plans to purchase our own place of worship. At that point, my father was constantly on the lookout for buildings or undeveloped land suited to our needs. A place did not even have to be up for sale for him to remark fervently on its potential as we drove past. Sometimes, if the place was for sale, we would stop and take a look around. His enthusiasm was contagious, and to this day I am drawn to every church I see, desiring to stop and get to know it, from the land to the liturgy.

We eventually purchased several acres of land, the bulk of which is set in a dell a good distance from the road. The property is bordered on one side by a large creek and backed by extensive woods. Here we constructed a small church building. Although we did not believe that there was anything particularly sacred about this or any other place on earth (other than the land promised to Abraham and his descendants), looking for a place to worship as a church felt (to me) like searching for holy ground, and moving into the place, we found, was like entering the promised land. I can remember my father, grandfather, and other church leaders turning over clods of earth with a shovel as we ceremonially dedicated the ground to its new use.

The following narrative is not an account of how I walked or drifted away from these beginnings, because I do not believe that that would be an accurate depiction of events or their outcome. Rather, I believe that I am still living in the same land into which, as a young boy, I was reborn by faith and baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. What follows is an account of how I went on to explore this land and how I came to see it as an essentially Catholic country. Over the years, there have been significant changes in my theology and ecclesial life, but my respect, admiration, and affection for the church of my childhood and young adulthood, the people and the place, is undiminished.

Another childhood experience also fostered an incipient concept of sacred space. When I was eleven or twelve years old, a friend lent me his copy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. This was the three-volume Ballantine Books paperback edition, with Tolkien’s own watercolor paintings on the front covers and, on the back covers, a delightful photograph of the author in profile, laughing and holding his pipe. This book turned out to be my ticket not only to a new fictional world but to a new way of seeing the natural world of everyday experience. I came to see the things of Earth through the lens of Middle Earth and so became convinced that the world is enchanted, in the sense of having an inherent meaning and significance. I was already familiar with the biblical depiction of the heavens and the earth as having been spoken into existence, duly arranged, and filled with lights and creatures (Genesis 1) that in turn “utter speech” to the glory of God (Psalm 19). Tolkien subtly encouraged me to “listen” for these words, creating and created, in nature.

Of course, one does not have to read fantasy to awaken to the beauty and mystery of the natural world, but in my case it was The Lord of the Rings that gave rise to and fostered this sensibility. It was in Middle Earth that I first learned to walk in wonder. I still reckon this to have been more than (though not less than) an aesthetic experience. Reading Tolkien elicited in me something that C. S. Lewis called joy—that is, an acute longing that does not exactly correspond to any finite thing. According to Lewis’ interpretation of this experience, joy is a signpost directing us to our ultimate, eternal home. I did not come across Lewis’ account of joy until some ten years after my first reading of The Lord of the Rings, but from that time I had often had the experience exactly as Lewis described it.

Although I did not at first perceive the connection between joy and heaven, Tolkien’s novel served as a kind of anchor for my soul during a period of my life (late boyhood to young adulthood) in which I began to care less and less about Christian faith and obedience. I had accepted the basic tenets of Christianity as these were presented in my home and church, in much the same way that I accepted my parents’ views on other matters from the time that I first understood them. As I began to make up my own mind about more and more things, it never once occurred to me to question the content of my religious instruction. I simply did not spend much time thinking about or trying to live by my beliefs. Nevertheless, through my reading and rereading of The Lord of the Rings and other books by Tolkien, an important (though relatively obscure) connection was maintained with something that I instinctively knew to be not only beautiful but holy.

Encountering God and Rediscovering the Bible

This is where Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES) comes into the picture. When I was about twenty-one, several students from SES started visiting our church. One of these students, an older, married man, formed a “college and career” group and began teaching Christian apologetics. I had been attending church services more often than not, mostly from a sense of family obligation. Now, at the prompting of my parents, I began going to the “college and career” meetings, during which the teacher recapitulated the content of his SES apologetics courses in a manner suitable for this church group. The philosophical arguments for the existence of God and the historical evidence for the claims of Christ and the reliability of the Bible appealed to me on an intellectual level. I had always believed that Christianity is true, but now I wanted to know about the evidence for Christianity and the relation of revealed truth to truth discovered by means other than Bible study, including observation, intuition, philosophy, mathematics, empirical science, and the liberal arts. Although I had no intention of changing my behavior, I became interested in Christianity in much the same way that one might become interested in any other subject.

Eventually, however, the thesis and corresponding evidence that the claims of Christ are true began to bear down on me, and I was brought face-to-face with the fact that I had built a barrier between faith and life. Now I began to think seriously about the implications of the gospel as truth, reasoning that if the gospel is indeed true, it cannot be confined to the realm of subjectivity but is instead a statement of the way things really are, regardless of what anyone thinks or feels about it. On one level, this was a straightforward and prosaic bit of philosophy. But on another level, and by the same token, it was breathtaking because this simple piece of reasoning introduced into the realm of my personal experience something like what is expressed in the 139th psalm. One night, while alone in my apartment, I was unexpectedly overwhelmed by the presence of God, and the barrier between faith and life was removed. A few months later, I went off to Bible college with the intention of earning a degree in theology and then returning home to obtain a degree in apologetics at SES. I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do with this education; I only wanted to know more of the truth that is in Christ Jesus.

I had a wonderful time in college, learning much, making good friends, and enjoying the natural beauty of the mountains, hills, and rivers of West Virginia. I spent much of my time in the library, reading theological journals and thereby being introduced to new perspectives on and various ways of engaging divine revelation. The Westminster Theological Journal and the Christian Scholar’s Review were among my favorites. I appreciated the former particularly for the articles on the Old Testament that elucidated aspects of salvation history as well as the relation between modern science and the Genesis narratives. The Christian Scholar’s Review enriched my developing theological views by exploring in myriad ways the relationship between theology and other kinds of learning, especially philosophy and literary studies.

In this way, I started to develop a “catholic,” or at least eclectic, frame of reference for exploring theological matters. I became willing to engage (and learn from) other kinds of Christians at the level of dialogue rather than mere disputation. Eventually my circle of reading would take in Catholic authors, including some of the classics in Western theology (Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas) along with a few twentieth-century philosophers, especially Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. The inclusion of Catholic theologians and philosophers in my increasingly diversified reading might be seen as a preamble to my eventual conversion, but it was not until I had been at seminary a few years that my own biblical-theological convictions began perceptibly to take a turn that would eventually lead me to the Catholic Church.

During my time at SES, the ethos of the school was definitely more speculative than practical, and I am entirely grateful for that. Quiet study in pursuit of truth as a good in itself was (and is) for me a welcome contrast to the bustling pragmatism and soul-constricting relativism of American society. Other aspects of seminary life, especially the number of remarkable people (among both students and faculty) I met there, are worth recalling in their own right, but here I will comment on only two general aspects of my education that helped me along the path to full communion with the Catholic Church.

The first and most obvious of these was the high regard in which Saint Thomas Aquinas was held at the seminary. That several of our professors took Aquinas to be a reliable guide in some fundamental philosophical and theological matters helped to break down my prejudice against the Catholic Church, much of which had already been dissipated by the aforementioned reading, along with the discovery that Tolkien was a faithful Catholic. Not every professor at SES was a Thomist, but the classes in philosophy, apologetics, prolegomena to theology, and theology proper were definitely taught from a Thomistic perspective. Through reasoning along with Saint Thomas, we discovered the inadequacy of reason regarding the mysteries of God, which must be received by faith on the basis of divine authority. We also learned, however, that faith does not abolish reason; rather, reason can help us to distinguish between genuine and spurious claims to divine authority and to understand better both the nature of what God has created and the meaning of what he has revealed, so as to love, obey, and adore him better. Thomism is not the only helpful school of Christian theology, but it is a deep well of biblical, theological, and philosophical wisdom. While making no claim to have personally explored its depths, I have tasted the water and found it to be cold and refreshing.

The second thing that brought me closer to Catholicism was learning to read the Bible as literature and canon. In my Old and New Testament seminary courses, we were helped to see and appreciate that the sacred authors used various literary genres and devices to convey their meanings, which were to be discovered in their respective contexts. But at the same time we were encouraged to understand this diverse set of writings in relation to one another as the written Word of God, such that the Bible could and should be read as a cohesive whole rather than a mere collection of disparate parts. Thus, my introduction to the Bible as literature was coupled with my introduction to what has been called “canonical” hermeneutics. Reading the Bible as canon, as a complete book, enhanced my budding appreciation of the Bible as literature. By paying attention to the canonical context of each portion of Scripture, I became more sensitive to both the direct and the allusive narrative weaving by which the inspired authors invoked, interpreted, and even anticipated other important events in sacred history. In this way, I discovered new depths in the long-familiar texts, with the result that I once more began really to enjoy reading the Bible.

Although I did not recognize it at the time, consciously reading the Bible as canon and deliberately employing the “analogy of faith” (Scripture interprets Scripture) was my first step in reading the Bible with church tradition as a guiding light. By reading the Bible as a complete and internally consistent book, I was tacitly assuming that fidelity to tradition—in this case, the traditional Protestant list of the books of the Bible—is a sound hermeneutical principle. It took a couple of years for this to become apparent to me, at which point I began consciously to accept tradition, more broadly construed, as hermeneutically essential and authoritative. From that point, it would be a few more years before I finally submitted to the ecclesial authority by which apostolic Tradition (2 Thess 2:15) is definitively distinguished from merely man-made traditions, opinions, and schools of thought.

While in college, my most absorbing interaction with Scripture had consisted of trying to reconcile various “problem texts” with the tenets of the theological system I had inherited from my home church and the teaching institutions with which we chose to associate—namely, classical Dispensationalism with particular emphasis on the doctrine of eternal salvation by belief alone. I was treating the biblical texts like puzzle pieces, and my doctrine of salvation was the picture into which those pieces must be fitted. Thus, I spent a lot of time reading the Bible at arm’s length, in a kind of defensive posture, not wanting to take the risk of discovering something that would lead me to reconsider my own theological convictions. Although the professors of biblical studies at SES held to more or less the same doctrine as I did, they were not as defensive about it as I was; at least, their interest in biblical theology was much broader than mine, which had been mainly confined to a few texts as either proving or threatening my doctrine of salvation.

Now, I began to appreciate those teachers and authors who seemed to be more interested in understanding the Bible itself than in underwriting a particular doctrine or school of thought. Following their example and instruction, I began to engage the Bible with a less polemical and more inquisitive mindset. One summer, I gave myself completely over to Scripture reading, my only goal being to engage the texts in a spirit of discovery. I bought a cheap, paperback Bible and read it from cover to cover, scrawling notes over every page, and so began to discover firsthand the unity, coherence, and beauty of the Bible from beginning to end.

By the time I finished seminary, my biblical theology could be summarized by the age-old aphorism “the New Testament is hidden in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New.” Dispensationalism, which in its classical form features a dichotomous reading of Sacred Scripture (Israel versus Church, law versus Gospel, even Gospels versus epistles), was part of the official doctrinal position of the seminary I attended, but that framework was not an important part of my educational experience there or my renewed, personal engagement with the Bible. On the other hand, neither was my developing biblical theology much influenced by Reformed Covenant theology, which in the Evangelical world is often contrasted with Dispensationalism. I read several books on the subject and found much in them that was helpful, but it never seemed to me that the Reformed brand of Covenant theology, featuring a “covenant of works” and a “covenant of grace,” was especially biblical; at least, I could not find any compelling reason to adopt that particular way of reading Scripture. One thing that was settled in my mind at that time, relative to those categories and debates, was that I could no longer accept the Dispensationalist thesis that the time of the Church is a parenthesis in the overall biblical narrative. Instead, I was beginning to see in Sacred Scripture a pattern of anticipation (Old Testament) and fulfillment (New Testament), with Christ being the crux of the narrative, and the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, being an integral part of the story.

The primary application, generally speaking, of my rediscovery of the Bible was that the most important hermeneutical question for me was no longer, “How does this passage apply to my life?” as though my life were the touchstone by which the value of Sacred Scripture was to be tested. Rather, I began to ask, “How do I apply my life to this passage?” such that the biblical narrative was taken to be the context in which my life made sense and found direction. From this standpoint, I found many direct and indirect applications of Scripture to my life, but the perspective on my life was now provided by the whole of salvation history, not merely the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American milieu. Because I now found the Church to be an integral part of the whole, the story of redemption ceased to be regarded as something confined to a text, the remote past, and an immanent but presently unrealized eschaton. Certainly, I believed that salvation history had been inscribed as divine revelation in the canonical texts, which preserve a record of events that occurred thousands of years ago, and that the end of the story carries us beyond this world to a “new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1). But I was also beginning to discover that, as implied by the Great Commission (Mt 28:19-20) and the gift of the Holy Spirit (Jn 14:15-29), redemptive history also includes the Christian centuries, the ongoing (according to one vivid characterization) “aftershocks” of the seismic victory of Christ over death and Hades.

Thus, without clearly recognizing or consciously desiring it, I was moving from an individualistic and contemporary form of Christian belief, focused on my life and immediate cultural background, to a more communal and traditional form of Christian faith, focused on the ongoing story of the presence and mighty works of God on behalf of, in, and through his chosen people across the world and throughout history. This growing interest in an expanded “sacred history” brought me directly to the threshold of Church history, including the 1,500 years that had passed between the end of the Acts of the Apostles and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

Worshipping God and Discovering the Liturgy

Closely related to my rediscovery of the Bible was my growing interest in the shape, content, and significance of the church’s corporate worship. This would eventually lead me carefully to consider the sacramental and liturgical aspects of worship, with a special focus on the Lord’s Supper. The first time I entertained more than a passing thought about the Supper was during one of my Bible college classes, in which a professor raised the question of whether the Lord’s Supper should be celebrated in any context other than a church worship service. My first thought was that the Lord’s Supper can be celebrated anywhere by any Christian. My subsequent thoughts, in justification of the first, were that every believer in Christ is a priest (1 Pet 2:9; Rev 1:6), that no believer is a priest in any sense besides the priesthood of every believer, and that consequently no specially ordained ministers were necessary to do anything that the church was supposed to do. Thus, if any two or three believers were gathered anywhere at any time in Jesus’ name, they could legitimately celebrate the Lord’s Supper in memory of him.

Of course, I had just associated the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper with the Christian priesthood, which is a bad move for a Protestant to make, since the connection between the Lord’s Supper and the priesthood has sacerdotal connotations. My intention, however, was simply to apply an egalitarian conception of the church’s ministry to the observance of the Supper. But I soon put the question aside and did not think about the matter again until some four years later, just before I graduated from seminary, when I spoke to a Reformed pastor about the requirements for receiving communion in his church. In my experience up to that point, studying and teaching were high spiritual priorities, while prayer, corporate worship, and the sacraments (or “ordinances”) were secondary considerations. When I considered the “assembling of ourselves together,” it seemed to be primarily a means to the end of hearing an informative sermon. But toward the end of my time in seminary, prompted by something that I was beginning to notice in the Bible, I began to look for a church with an emphasis on liturgical worship, prayer, and the sacraments.

What I was starting to see in Scripture is that the ritual or sacrificial worship of God is a major theme that can be traced from Genesis to Revelation—from the Garden of Eden (which some biblical theologians have described as the “holy of holies” in the temple of creation), through the altars of Abel, Noah, and the Patriarchs and the Tabernacle and Temple liturgies of Israel, to the Upper Room, the Christian assembly, and the Heavenly Sanctuary and Throne Room, all of which center on Calvary. The “tree of life” underscores and encapsulates the sacramental aspect of redemptive history by linking Eden (Gen 2:9; 3:22), the Cross (Gal 3:13), and the New Jerusalem (Rev 22:1-2). I began to think that Christian worship that aspires to be biblical should be deeply informed by these biblical examples and themes of worship.

I had previously assumed that because the New Testament does not include detailed rubrics for worship, the apostles were tacitly condoning a “free-for-all” approach to church services (within the limits of generic propriety). Clearly, the New Testament offers few instructions concerning the structure of Church services, but it is also clear that these early services included the ritual action of celebrating the Lord’s Supper in obedience to Christ’s command. In addition to instructions on the Supper provided in the New Testament, there were other indicators that the liturgical forms of Christian worship that developed in the early Church are rooted in apostolic authority. The Gospels themselves, in addition to being theologically significant historical records and resources for private contemplation, serve as a kind of manual for worship. The Christian liturgy—in particular, Sunday worship (the Lord’s Day) and the Church year—is patterned after the life of Christ as presented by the four evangelists. In addition to this, and given the relation of anticipation and fulfillment between the Old Covenant and the New, it seemed to me that Israel’s now fulfilled and superseded cultus could legitimately be drawn upon by the Christian Church, not as a binding code but as a kind of template for liturgical worship, with the sacrifice of the Lamb of God standing in the place of animal sacrifices (Rev 5:6).

From the Christian perspective of the New Testament authors, the religious rituals and symbols of the Old Covenant were shadows and types of something greater—namely, the New Covenant in Christ Jesus. In the New Testament it is stated that the Old Covenant has been fulfilled by Christ, who is the substance or reality of those former things, which, being fulfilled, have now “passed away” (cf. Col 2:17; Heb 8:13). There is, however, a resemblance between the lesser and the greater, type and antitype, anticipation and fulfillment. The self-sacrifice of Christ at Calvary and the liturgy of the Heavenly Throne Room, featuring Christ’s present priestly session administered with his own blood (Heb 7:23-25), is the fulfillment of the Tabernacle and Temple liturgies, which featured the Aaronic priesthood administered with the blood of bulls and rams (Heb 9:11-15). This principle applies to baptism and circumcision (Col 2:11-12) as well as the Lord’s Supper and the Passover (1 Cor 5:7-8). Thus, the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ, as ritually remembered in the sacraments and through the course of the Church’s liturgical year, fulfills but also somewhat resembles Israel’s divine worship, including her seasonal feasts and fasts. Precisely because the New Covenant fulfills the Old, these resemblances do not involve a repetition or prolongation of the former Covenant, nor do they entail that the efficacy of the New Covenant rites is no greater than that of the Old. But the similarities between the covenants, as embedded in the very relation of anticipation and fulfillment, do suggest that the relation between the liturgical life of Israel and that of the Church cannot be reduced to mere opposition.

I was vaguely aware that the Church’s communal worship, like the divine worship of Israel, has historically been liturgical, following a set pattern of rituals, prayers, and seasons. This tradition now began to appeal to me as being distinctly Bible based. For me, drawing primarily upon biblical examples and images, the word liturgy evoked the notion of a beautiful, reverent, and ritualized form of public worship that is handed down by tradition and rooted in divine revelation—worship marked less by the transient forms of the secular world and more by the permanent things of heaven, insofar as they have been revealed to the people of God. I still had no clear doctrinal ideas about the sacraments, and no knowledge of the history of the Christian liturgy, but there was a growing sense that I had been missing out on something important—and I wanted in. Of course, I knew that the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church feature liturgical worship and sacraments, but I was not prepared to go exploring that far afield from Evangelicalism. Among confessional and (more or less) liturgical Protestant churches, the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition was more familiar to me than either Lutheranism or Anglicanism, so it was there that I chose to begin searching for “something more.”

Apostolic Succession and the Eucharist

A few months before receiving my seminary degree, I began attending a traditional Presbyterian church. During a private meeting, the church’s pastor told me that according to the bylaws of the denomination I needed to be a member in good standing of an “Evangelical” church in order to receive communion (in this context, I think that Evangelical simply meant Protestant, or perhaps conservative Protestant). I had always been taught that a person is a member of the church simply by virtue of having been saved through believing the true gospel—neither baptism nor profession of faith nor anything else was required for church membership. But that teaching referred primarily to an invisible “universal Church”, whereas in stating the requirement for receiving communion, this Reformed pastor clearly had in mind membership in a visible church. As I considered the matter, the first thing that came to mind was that I had never formally become a member of any visible church, not even the church in which I grew up. I had been baptized with water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, but I was not sure how this event related to church membership.

Now I was being encouraged to join a visible church formally in order to receive communion. This again raised the question that I had briefly considered in Bible college: What was the essential difference, if any, between receiving communion in this or any other “Evangelical” church and receiving it at home alone or with two or three fellow believers, having myself recited the “words of institution” (Mt 26:26-28) over a piece of bread and a cup of wine? The difference between raising the question at this point and asking it four years earlier was that I was no longer cocksure about the principle of ministerial egalitarianism in the Christian church. The New Testament clearly teaches the priesthood of all believers, but it is just as clear that the apostles received a special kind of power and authority directly from Christ. For one thing, Christ himself had given the apostles the commission to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist: “Do this in memory of me.” In their turn, as they went about establishing churches and setting things in order, the apostles ordained other men to distinct positions of service and authority in the churches and conferred upon those churches the commission to celebrate the Eucharist: “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you” (1 Cor 11:23).

Still, so far as I could tell, the New Testament did not give a clear answer to the specific question of who was authorized to celebrate the Eucharist. But as previously indicated, I was beginning to be convinced that Church history should inform Christian faith and practice, such that a question not answered in the Bible (either directly or by deduction) did not necessarily have to be chalked up as an indifferent matter or as something perpetually and in principle unresolvable. So I turned to the history of the early Church to see if there was any information on this particular question. The epistles of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, written around A.D. 107, provided me with an answer: a valid Eucharist is one celebrated by a bishop or someone whom the bishop has appointed to celebrate this sacrament. Thus, the Eucharist, which originated at Christ’s own hands, was received and handed down in the Church through the apostles to the bishops and those whom the bishops ordained to celebrate this sacrament (i.e., the presbyters). Further investigation revealed this to be a deeply historical and, for 1,300 years, universal form of Church polity. But I was still not quite convinced that this “episcopal” ministry was biblical. I thought that “Presbyterian” (or else “congregational”) polity might have mistakenly died out at the end of the first century or the middle of the second century, to be replaced by an episcopal polity that Christ and the apostles never intended.

As is generally acknowledged, in the New Testament and other early Christian documents the terms bishop and presbyter were not used, or at least not clearly and consistently used, with reference to two distinct offices in the Church. Rather, bishop and presbyter were deployed descriptively and interchangeably in referring to ordained Christian ministers (including apostles). It was only after the time of the apostles that these terms began to be clearly and consistently used in reference to two distinct offices,Cf. Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians, chap. 6. so that by the end of the second century, episcopal polity featuring three distinct grades of ministry—bishop, presbyter, and deacon—is clearly evidenced throughout the Church, which has remained the case everywhere throughout history (with the exception of a few sects and the Protestant ecclesial communities).

Nevertheless, because of the way the words bishop and presbyter were used in the earliest Christian writings, I had always assumed that the distinction of the offices of bishops and presbyters was an illegitimate development within the Church. I never paused to consider how the Church after the time of the apostles could have almost immediately and universally lapsed into error on this fundamental point of polity, with no record of a general outcry in protest or any Church council called to deal with the ubiquitous mistake. Now I did pause to consider the matter and wondered if perhaps it was I, rather than the universal Church, that had been missing something. It seemed only fair to take another look.

The first thing I noticed was that in maintaining that the Christian ministry in the New Testament comprised only two grades of ordained ministers, (1) bishop-presbyters and (2) deacons, I had been overlooking something both obvious and essential: (3) the ministry of the apostles themselves. The apostles clearly had distinct authority over their fellow bishop-presbyters. They had authority to establish orthodoxy and otherwise set things in order in the churches, including ordaining other men as bishop-presbyters and deacons. This apostolic authority in the Church is evidenced by the commission of our Lord to the apostles (Lk 10:16; Mt 28:19-20), the book of Acts, and the contents of the New Testament epistles, most of which were written by apostles and provide authoritative instruction on a variety of matters. Furthermore, and this was the crucial point, although it soon came to be widely acknowledged that the time of new, public revelation had come to an end with the deaths of the apostles, we can see evidence in the New Testament that distinctively apostolic authority was passed down to men such as Titus and Timothy, who, in addition to being bishop-presbyters themselves, exercised distinctive pastoral oversight among other bishop-presbyters in preserving the tradition of the apostles (1 Tim 6:20), setting things in order in the churches (Tit 1:5), and ordaining other bishop-presbyters and deacons (1 Tim 5:22). Eventually, the term bishop came to be used exclusively of this type of ministry, and presbyter was used to refer to those ministers who did not exercise such oversight, but were ordained by a bishop to celebrate the Eucharist, teach, and provide pastoral care in unity with the bishop.

Thus, the apostolic structure and authority of the Church’s ministry, together with the integrity of her liturgical and sacramental life, was preserved in the transition from the apostles with their fellow bishop-presbyters and deacons to bishops with their fellow presbyters and deacons. Pastoral authority in teaching, governing, and sanctifying (administering the sacraments) was given by Christ to the apostles and by the apostles to the bishops, who, along with the presbyters and deacons, minister to the lay faithful. The Christian laity, being “a royal race of priests”, serve God by cherishing and faithfully continuing in this living tradition in unity with their pastors, whereby the Church is built up from within (Eph 4:11-16) and becomes “salt and light” to the world (Mt 5:13-16).

While inquiring into the origin and development of episcopal polity, I also learned more about the early Church’s understanding of the Eucharist, not only with reference to who was authorized to celebrate this sacrament (namely, bishops and presbyters in apostolic succession), but also with regard to the real presence of Christ in the consecrated species, per his own words of institution: “This is my Body. . . This is my Blood.” Taken as a whole, from East to West and throughout the centuries, it is evident that the universal Church has believed and taught that in the celebration of the Eucharist the bread and wine really become the Body and Blood of Christ, which communicants who are rightly prepared receive unto their souls’ health and salvation. It is also evident, not least through the appropriation of sacerdotal terms to the offices of bishop and presbyter and the sacrament of the Eucharist itself (e.g., priest, altar, oblation), that the Church has everywhere believed that the Eucharist is in some way a true sacrifice pleasing to God, even though it does not involve the repeated death of the Victim. In becoming acquainted with the teaching of the historical Church on these matters, I became more aware of the sacrificial terms and allusions in the New Testament, with reference to Christ’s Passion and present priestly session as well as the Lord’s Supper, the apostolic ministry, and the people of God as a whole. In this way, I came to believe that the Church’s ordained priestly ministry, far from being opposed to or in addition to the work of Christ, depends entirely on that work for its efficacy, as being a participation in that work (Rom 15:16; 1 Cor 5:7-8; 10:14-22; 2 Cor 5:11-21; Heb 13:10).

While investigating these matters, I also, by way of comparison, became more familiar with how the various Protestant denominations have historically understood the nature of Christian worship, particularly the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. From what I could tell, all of the leading Protestant Reformers rejected the traditional understanding that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice, and they also denied that the Eucharistic bread and wine are invisibly changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. Furthermore, all the Protestant churches rejected the sacerdotal ministry of bishops and presbyters (priests) as passed down in a sacramental succession from the apostles and instead developed their own forms of ordained ministry. Nevertheless, some of the first Protestants had ideas about the nature and benefits of sacramental communion that were miles away from any form of Evangelicalism to which I had been exposed. I did not know quite what to believe and confess regarding the Lord’s Supper, but I desired to be united to Christ in whatever way he had intended when instituting the sacrament of his Body and Blood.

The Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion seemed to allow the greatest latitude in belief relative to most matters, including the Eucharist, which perfectly suited my growing interest combined with my (as yet) lack of conviction regarding the truth (or falsehood) of many important points of doctrine. I also appreciated that Anglicans had an episcopal church polity and an elegant form of liturgical worship enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer. What I had experienced of the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition was very admirable in its own way, but as I became more familiar with Church history it seemed to me that many of the treasures of the Christian tradition had been lost upon that way. I thought that at least some of those lost treasures might be found in Anglicanism.

Anglo-Catholicism

I soon discovered a traditional Anglican church less than a mile from my apartment. This community was more of the Anglo-Catholic persuasion, which is distinguished from other Anglican beliefs and practices by its emphasis on the continuity of the Church of England after the Protestant Reformation with the Church in England before the Reformation. My first visit to this church was for a midweek, noonday holy communion service. I will never forget kneeling in the dimly lit, Gothic-style church building, surrounded by stained-glass images of our Lord with angels and saints, while the priest stood (facing East) at what was clearly a high altar, complete with crucifix and tabernacle, and read the holy communion service from the Anglican Missal. (This missal comprised the Anglican Book of Common Prayer supplemented with prayers, in English translation, from the traditional Roman Missal.) Afterward, I spoke with the priest, briefly explaining my situation. I continued to visit, and we continued to talk. He told me that joining a “sacramental church” involves a “serious commitment” and that I could not receive communion until I had been “confirmed by a bishop in apostolic succession”.

In the course of subsequent conversations and reading, I learned that, from an Anglo-Catholic point of view, the Church is hierarchical at the local level, being made manifest on Earth primarily in the Eucharistic assembly over which the bishop, or a presbyter ordained by and in communion with the bishop, presides. (In this way, Anglo-Catholicism follows the teaching of Saint Ignatius of Antioch.) The universal Church is supposed to be manifested (1) in each of these local assemblies in union with their respective bishops and (2) in the communion of all such assemblies with one another. Anglo-Catholics further believe that the universal, or catholic, Church has been divided into three branches: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican (the “branch theory”). What these branches are supposed to have in common is the episcopal ministry preserved in apostolic succession and with it the fullness of the Church’s sacramental life. What divides the branches are ecclesiological and cultural differences and disagreement over various doctrines and practices.

I became an Anglo-Catholic and a member of this particular Anglican parish for three reasons. First, there was the testimony to the beauty of holiness inscribed in the church building and the liturgy. Second, I thought that being Anglo-Catholic was a genuine way to be “catholic”, which to me meant embracing the fullness of the Church’s life from the beginning down to the present day, rather than simply stopping at the end of the first century and picking back up with Martin Luther or John Calvin or whomever in the sixteenth century or later. Anglo-Catholics claim to accept and abide by the teachings of the “undivided Church of the first millennium”. Due to my growing awareness of and regard for the Church of these centuries, this was an important point in favor of Anglo-Catholicism. Third, the Anglo-Catholic branch theory of the Church, coupled with the long-standing disunity and doctrinal divergences among the branches, guaranteed that I would not have to receive the teaching of any presently unified and visible Christian community, including the Anglo-Catholic communities, as being in itself the settled teaching of the universal Church that Christ established. Thus, I could have the orthodoxy of history (up to a time) without the undivided Church of history and could rely on my private judgment for discerning the truth or deciding that the truth was unknowable in matters where the various branches of the divided Church disagreed with one another.

The third reason for becoming Anglican, however, was like a swinging door—it could as easily lead one out of as into the Anglican Communion. The personal autonomy from magisterial teaching built into the Anglican branch theory granted me the freedom, in good faith, to question the branch theory itself, since, by the nature of the case, that theory could not be considered a binding article of faith. Granted that a visibly unified and authoritative universal Church once existed and that two of the three genuine “branches” of the putatively divided Church consider themselves still to be that one Church, it is natural if not inevitable for an Anglo-Catholic to wonder whether Anglo-Catholicism’s own criterion of catholicity might rule out the branch theory. This methodological consideration was brought into greater focus by Church history (when did “schisms from the Church” become “branches of the Church”?) and biblical theology (“is Christ divided?”), which gradually led me to believe that the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, though undoubtedly wounded by schism, still abides in her integral existence and operation such that the promises of Christ to the apostolic Church (“whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven” [Mt 16:19]) continue to be practically applicable at the universal level. It seemed to me that neither a divided church nor an invisible church could bind or loose at the universal level.

I knew that to look for and (if she might be found) enter into full communion with the one, visible Catholic Church would in effect mean abandoning every form of Protestantism, including Anglo-Catholicism, because the various Protestant denominations (and non-denominations) for the most part did not even claim to be the one universal Church that Christ founded, and the few that did make such a claim (along with some of the cults) were manifestly late arrivals on the historical scene, so they could not possibly be the universal Church founded in the first century. In this way I ceased to be Protestant sometime before I became Catholic.

As with liturgical worship and the Eucharist, my desire to find the universal Church and the local churches in full communion with the universal Church was in essence a desire to be more fully and deeply united to Christ. In both cases, my reasoning was fairly simple, and my premises were based on the words of Scripture. If the Eucharist truly is Christ’s Body and Blood, and if the Church truly is “the fulness of him who fills all in all”, “the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (Eph 1:23; 1 Tim 3:15), the Mystical Body and Bride of Christ, then someone who loves Christ and has a sufficient awareness of and conviction about these things will be diligent in securing them for himself, like a trader who finds a pearl of great price or a man who discovers treasure in a field (Mt 13:4-46).

The Catholic Church

In setting out to look for the universal Church that Christ founded, I was immediately faced with a long-foreseen difficulty: I would have to consider the mutually exclusive claims of two churches, each being ancient and alive, each abiding throughout history in material continuity with the first-century Church, each claiming to be the one universal Church established by Christ. These two churches are, of course, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. It was apparent to me by this time that if the universal Church that Christ founded still exists visibly on Earth, and if I were to find and join that Church, I would have to choose a side (i.e., join one church or the other) in the thousand-year-old schism between Orthodox and Catholics. I was no longer receiving communion or making aural confession at my Anglican parish, because I could not do so in good conscience. But neither could I in good conscience become either Catholic or Orthodox, because I knew that to join either of these churches would require a profession of faith that I could not yet make.

I longed, however, to receive Christ in the Eucharist, and I wanted to confess my sins and receive absolution through the ministry of his Church. So I prayed that the Holy Spirit would lead me to the Church that Christ founded and enable me to accept this Church’s teaching by faith, on the basis of the authority that our Lord had given her. I admired the Orthodox Church for its emphasis on tradition and the corresponding richness of its liturgical life. I was also well aware that the Catholic Church is presently suffering from some serious maladies in this regard. Still, there were a variety of factors that drew me toward Catholicism. My Protestant background suggested the necessity of reconciliation with the Catholic Church because that had been at least our most proximate point of departure from the historical Church.

Furthermore, as an Anglo-Catholic I had come to appreciate, along with the Church Fathers in the period of Late Antiquity, medieval history, theology, literature, and devotions. To me, the Middle Ages on the whole represented an enrichment of Christian life and learning. Above all, my liturgical formation had been based on an Anglicized version of the traditional Roman Missal, Roman Ceremonial, and Church calendar. The Western tradition felt like home, intellectually, culturally, and liturgically. The Orthodox Church, by contrast, was unfamiliar. I admired Eastern iconography, and I knew by report that Orthodox liturgies were theologically richer and more beautiful than the contemporary liturgy of the Catholic Church. Still, I never visited an Orthodox church. I thought that choosing Orthodoxy would involve a general repudiation of Catholicism and consequently a loss of much of the rich theological, intellectual, and cultural heritage of the historical Church and the Christian centuries. On the other hand, I believed that the Catholic Church was in theory and in practice open to the spiritual riches of Orthodoxy and the Christian East. Thus, my propensity for catholicity further inclined me toward Catholicism. Finally, the local Church of Rome itself exercised something like a magnetic pull upon me, as it has upon so many Christians going back to the earliest times.Rom 1:11-12; 15:23-24; “Inscription of Abercius”; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3, 3, 2.

Despite these predilections for Catholicism, my initial visits to Roman Catholic parishes were discouraging. I could not enter into the spirit of the liturgy but was instead disoriented by the new form of the Roman Rite, which, as I experienced it, was disappointingly different from both my biblical-theological vision of liturgical worship and my liturgical experience as an Anglo-Catholic. It seemed to me that the Tabernacle / Temple dimension of worship with its emphasis on the Eucharistic sacrifice and the “mystery of godliness” had been pushed to the background by the introduction of an ordo in which the unity of the liturgical action along with the “vertical” and numinous dimension of worship are rendered (relatively) obscure. Furthermore, although it is the Catholic Church’s express intention that every Mass be celebrated reverently, it is commonplace for Catholics to tell stories of post—Vatican II liturgies that have purposely been anything but reverent. I certainly did not come in for the worst of things, but my trek toward Catholicism was initially stymied by my encounters with the new liturgy.It bears mentioning that many of the Catholics I know, including converts, have had a much more positive experience with the new form of the Roman Rite. Many of them heartily approve of the reformed liturgy as being more accessible for the laity and, in general, less of a barrier or stumbling block to Protestants. I do not wish to quarrel with them, and it is evident that on some points and in many cases they are right. For the purpose of this narrative, suffice to say that my initial impressions were what they were, and they played a large part in determining the timing and mode of my conversion.

Nevertheless, the growing conviction that I ought to become a member of the Catholic Church proved durable. This conviction was based partly on the biblical, theological, and historical evidence concerning the distinctive role of the apostle Peter, the Church of Rome, and the papacy in the life of the universal Church. (Vladimir Soloviev’s Russia and the Universal Church was helpful on this point.) But it was also, as previously stated, based partly on something harder to define, something like a spiritual compass coupled with personal, intellectual, and cultural associations and affinities, largely fostered by literature and theological reading. I did consider the possibility that the Catholic Church to which I was drawn was in no small part the product of my imagination, or else a thing of the past, with the present reality being essentially different. Some of the strongest points made in favor of the Catholic Church in some of the books I had been reading seemed largely inapplicable in the situation following Vatican II. Still, I had learned from Aristotle via Saint Thomas that there is a difference between a substantial change and an accidental change, so I was open to considering the possibility that the Catholic Church remained substantially (in identity and essence) the same Church after the Council and the promulgation of the new form of the liturgy, despite being much altered in appearance.

Being an Anglican, specifically an Anglo-Catholic, John Henry Newman became very dear to me during this transitional period. Because of my concerns about the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and the “spirit of Vatican II” that pervaded the Catholic Church in the ensuing decades, I could somewhat identify with Newman’s difficulties in the ideological atmosphere surrounding the First Vatican Council (1869—1870), even though that atmosphere or prevailing climate of opinion was in some ways the polar opposite of the one that permeated Vatican II. Newman’s response to the situation, including his full acceptance of the dogmatic declarations of Vatican I, provided me with a good example of fidelity to the Church as well as a context for understanding why Vatican II was needed and what it achieved, particularly in correcting the unhealthy and extreme tendencies toward clericalism, centralism, and authoritarianism that had plagued the Church during Newman’s lifetime.

To gain some understanding of the context of Vatican II, I did, of course, carefully read the Council documents themselves. Although some of these documents contained what appeared to me to be boilerplate affirmations, intentional ambiguities, and other things difficult to understand (in some instances being relative to my own ignorance), most of the material I found to be biblical and traditional. Furthermore, the teaching of the Council is saturated with a sense of Christian joy and gratefulness for the good things of God on the levels of both grace and nature. I very much appreciated this point of emphasis. So, while I struggled with some things in the conciliar documents and some of the changes in the Catholic Church following the Council, I was encouraged by other changes in emphasis and outlook (including some of the proposals for organic development of the liturgy) leading up to and introduced by Vatican II.

It is undeniable that in the fields of academic theology and biblical studies, as well as in some forms of pastoral practice, the so-called spirit of Vatican II is invoked to justify and advance the kind of liberalism that has marked many mainline Protestant denominations over the past century. But the Council documents and, just as importantly, the postconciliar teaching of the Magisterium itself are a different matter. Even supposing that some statements in the Council documents were intended, by some of the individuals who helped draft them, to be a Trojan horse by which to import non-Catholic ideas into the Church, it would not follow that those private intentions constitute the meaning of the statements in their public, ecclesial context (i.e., their meaning as taught by the Catholic Church). Furthermore, the sense in which such ambiguous and potentially problematic statements are to be interpreted would be (and in some instances has been) established by the ongoing teaching of the Magisterium as well as by prior teaching and tradition. As I read the encyclicals of Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, along with many of the documents published after the Council by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it became apparent that the Catholic Church still spoke as the unique and authoritative bearer of the ancient and universal Christian tradition. Whatever experiments in banality and infidelity might be at work within the Church, it was clear to me that she still maintained a sense of her identity in continuity with the past.

Along with the writings and example of Newman, the Council documents themselves, and the postconciliar teaching of the Magisterium, two other things helped me a great deal in overcoming my reservations about the Catholic Church consequent upon the changes introduced by and following the Second Vatican Council:

1. I discovered that there is a school of thought within orthodox Catholic circles that, though in no way denying the teaching of Vatican II or the validity of the sacraments celebrated according to the new form of the Roman Rite, has been quite critical of the liturgical reforms (not to mention liturgical abuses) that followed the Council. Among the leading lights of this school, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is preeminent, not least because of his elevation to the papacy as Benedict XVI. I was pleased to find that there are people in the Latin Church, from the grassroots to the highest level, who maintain a comprehensive, inclusive, and active appreciation of their own liturgical patrimony.

2. The “hermeneutic of continuity” advocated by Pope Benedict XVI appealed to me as the most reasonable way to interpret the teaching of Vatican II, particularly for anyone who believes that the Catholic Church is the universal Church that Christ founded. Since, for reasons independent of the Council, I was coming to believe exactly that, the hermeneutic of continuity followed almost as a matter of course; in which case, whatever difficulties I had in harmonizing the teaching of the Council with other instances of the Church’s teaching ought to be met with faith in Christ and the expectation of a bountiful theological harvest, consequent upon careful, submissive, and sustained engagement with the whole of the Catholic Church’s tradition. (It helped that I had long been used to taking this same approach when considering apparent internal inconsistencies or points of tension in the canon of Sacred Scripture.)

After three years or so of investigating the matter, I concluded that the apparent rupture in the Catholic Church, between the present and the past, while it could be fairly characterized as a crisis, did not constitute a change of identity. Much that is true, good, and beautiful has been obscured in recent decades (a problem not unique to our time), but nothing has been irrevocably lost or repudiated, and some important things have been, or are being, restored. All things considered, and with a few exceptions, I could not pretend to be attracted to the contemporary Catholic Church insofar as I had experienced it, but neither could I honestly deny that this is the same Church that has existed throughout the Christian centuries. The Church had survived the Arian crisis, the iconoclast controversies, the infamous “pornocracy” of the tenth century, the Western Schism (1378—1418), the Renaissance popes, and many other upheavals and scandals. My sense told me that she would likewise survive naturalistic higher criticism, narcissistic liturgical and theological experimentation, and the general influence of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, though these troubles, being nearer, weighed more heavily on my sensibility.

Among other matters that I took some time to investigate before becoming Catholic were those grievous enormities that have been referred to collectively as “the sexual abuse scandal”. I read a few books on the history of the scandal, beginning with Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, by the Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe. I also read many reports and articles as more and more grievous facts were brought to light, pertaining not only to the United States but also to many other parts of the world. I had to accept that if I were to become Catholic, along with receiving an inheritance in the great truth, goodness, and beauty that has been manifested throughout the Church’s long history, I would be coming in for a share of the shame that pertains to notorious evils that have been perpetrated by Catholics, particularly those in ecclesial office. I am ashamed by the facts that some Catholic priests, using their office as a cloak, have sexually molested children and young persons, and some Catholic bishops have covered up these crimes instead of pursuing justice. I can understand that, for some people who would otherwise be open to considering the claims of the Catholic Church, these facts can form an all-but-insuperable barrier to conversion or even conversation. Certainly, there can be no excuse for these sins. I would simply encourage people to learn what they can, not just about the Catholic sexual abuse scandal but about the whole of the Catholic Church’s life, including the ministry of her priests, the vast majority of whom are guiltless in this matter. Most especially, I hope that people will take the time to become familiar with the great Catholic saints who shine with the light of Christ throughout the Church’s history. That is what I tried to do, and in the end I found that I was able to follow my conscience and enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.

A short time before I formally withdrew from membership in my Anglican parish, I became convinced that full participation in the life of the Body of Christ normally includes being in full communion with the Pope, the successor of Saint Peter in Rome, the same Peter to whom our Lord Jesus Christ made those promises recorded in Matthew 16. The decisive moment came while I was attending a clergy conference of the Anglican province to which I belonged. (I was preparing for ordination and so was invited to attend.) On the way to the conference, I told my pastor about my intention to leave the Anglican Church for the Roman Catholic Church. He gave me counsel and encouraged me to talk to other priests at the conference. I did so after dinner that evening, and their advice in response was both helpful and kindly delivered. Then I stayed up to read G. K. Chesterton’s short book The Catholic Church and Conversion. There was nothing in this particular book that was especially decisive, objectively speaking, for the Catholic Church’s claims, but before I went to sleep that night, I had come to accept those claims. I finally believed in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, as I had long been confessing in the Nicene Creed. The next day, I said a final good-bye to the Anglican priests whom I had come to know and respect during four years in their communion.

Now it was time to seek entrance into the Catholic Church. For a few months after the Anglican clergy conference, I continued to visit Roman Catholic parishes, but I was daunted by the size of the parishes, which in my area ranged from several hundred to a few thousand families. (Each church that I had previously been part of was quite small, such that the members all knew one another. This made for a strong sense of family with corresponding affection and accountability.) Besides this, I still could not adjust to the new liturgy. Finally, I visited a small community listed as Saint Basil the Great Ukrainian Catholic Mission, which was meeting in the chapel of the local Catholic high school. The chapel had been booked by another group on the evening of my first visit, so the Mission had temporarily arranged to use the school’s library for the liturgy. There, in a small space cleared out among tables and rows of books, I encountered for the first time in person the ancient Eucharistic liturgy of the Byzantine Rite, the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom.

Earlier in this story, I mentioned my love for Middle Earth, but the Divine Liturgy called to mind Perelandra, C. S. Lewis’ paradisiacal depiction of the planet Venus. Even in the incongruous setting of a high school library, the liturgy was overflowing with beauty and reverence. But there was nothing either starched or stifling about it. The liturgical action was a free and organic unity, a living whole, both ancient and full of life, both ordered and extravagant. It made me think of the Garden of Eden, which is likewise recalled by the Tabernacle and Temple of ancient Israel. The Divine Liturgy made sense on an intuitive level and filled me with a peace beyond understanding. The priest who celebrated the liturgy, the bishop of this eparchy (diocese), and the particular Eastern Church to which they belong, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, are in full communion with the Pope, for whom the celebrant prays by name at each liturgical service. Here the door was opened, and about two months later I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church by a solemn profession of faith, receiving the sacraments of chrismation (confirmation) and the Holy Eucharist according to the Byzantine Rite.

In some ways, my transition from West to East has been almost as slow and difficult as my transition from Evangelicalism to the Catholic Church. Despite the immediate appeal of the liturgy, understanding and embracing the Greek / Slavic Christian tradition was not something that I could do overnight. In fact, at first I was only canonically a Byzantine Catholic, being at heart an Anglicized Roman Catholic pining for something like a medieval country parish, or a Catholic village clustered around an old seaside monastery, or just a small Roman Catholic church in Charlotte that worships according to one of the older rites of the Western Church.

Over the past few years, however, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has become my home, in my heart as well as in canon law. My native romanticism has gradually been taken up (without being destroyed) into something more concrete and more edifying—namely, participation in the distinctive liturgical life of this particular church with the fellow believers at Saint Basil’s. As Eastern Catholics, we are committed to both our unity with Rome and our own tradition, with its distinctive liturgy, theology, spirituality, discipline, and history, most of which we share with the Orthodox Church. However, as someone who came to the Catholic Church from Protestantism through Anglo-Catholicism, as a North American of Western European descent, and as a longtime admirer of the Middle Ages in general and Saint Thomas Aquinas in particular, I have been and undoubtedly will continue to be formed by both Western and Eastern traditions. These two traditions (which Pope John Paul II likened to two lungs) are mutually enriching aspects of the Holy Tradition that comes to us through the centuries from the apostles.

Where Heaven and Earth Meet

Much of this narrative has been focused on liturgical worship in the Church, but this is not because I have lost sight of the promise of eternal life with God in heaven. Far from it. The orientation of my spiritual life as a Catholic and in my life’s longing for “holy ground” has been distinctly heavenward, though I did not always clearly recognize this and have often, through sin, wandered in another direction. But always I have been called homeward by the promise of heaven, the hope of heaven, and a dim perception of the uncreated beauty of that eternal realm in the beauty of creation.

In college and seminary, I thought a lot and occasionally argued about the means by which we receive the gift of eternal life, but I did not often think about eternal life itself. The pivotal moment for my understanding of salvation came just before I left seminary, when I began to think carefully about the teaching of Saint John the beloved apostle to the effect that eternal life is knowing God (Jn 17:3), and knowing God consists not only of having faith but also of abiding in love through keeping the commandments of Christ (1 Jn 3:10-24). For Saint John, abiding in eternal life is incompatible with abiding in death, but this does not entail that everyone who abides in eternal life is sinless; there is sin unto death (“mortal sin”) and sin not unto death (1 Jn 5:16-17). Only the former extinguishes spiritual life. Even when a baptized Christian commits sin unto death, the free gift of forgiveness, cleansing, and reconciliation is available through confession (1 Jn 1:9). When I followed Saint John from his Gospel to his first epistle and back again, it seemed to me that abiding in eternal life and abiding in death by committing and refusing to repent of mortal sin are mutually exclusive because eternal life itself is not merely an infinite duration of conscious existence (even the damned have that), nor is it merely a promise about the future; rather, eternal life is a particular kind of life given and received as a gift here and now. It is a participation in the very life of God, who is love; hence, to have eternal life is to abide in love, which both fulfills the law (1 Jn 4:7-21; Rom 13:8-10) and triumphs over death and darkness (1 Jn 1:1-7; 2:1-11; 4:4-21).

Understanding eternal life as a gift whose nature is to know God by abiding in love caused me to reassess several of the assumptions that had always informed my doctrine of salvation, including the sharp contrasts that I had drawn between a gift and a way of life, justification and sanctification, forgiveness and cleansing, and God’s grace and man’s participation in that grace. Now I began to understand these things as being involved one in the other, as various facets of the same gift. Understanding eternal life as a way of life also helped me better appreciate those parts of the Gospel of John, such as the “bread of life” discourse in John 6 and the “fruit and vine” analogy in John 15, in which our life in Christ is portrayed in sacramental and participatory terms rather than as something abstract and static. Thus, several years before I entered the Catholic Church, I came to embrace in a general way an understanding of salvation that has been held by Catholic and Orthodox believers throughout the Christian centuries, an understanding that has sometimes been described as “covenantal and sacramental realism”.

From the standpoint of covenantal and sacramental realism, the gift of salvation is not characterized by or based on a purely legal arrangement in which “the righteousness of God” is an extrinsic and alien quality that is merely imputed to those who believe; rather, the gift of salvation is fundamentally a familial covenant relationship in which those who are by nature sinners and strangers to the covenant of promise are by grace, through faith, forgiven, cleansed, and made sons of God who really participate in their Father’s righteousness. Through faith in Christ, by the grace of God given in the sacraments, sinners truly become what God declares them to be. This great salvation flows directly from and is realized in union with Christ, the only-begotten Son and Divine Word of God, who was born and lived among us, self-sacrificially died on the Cross for our sins, was raised from the dead for our justification, ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. Those who believe in Christ are delivered from the dominion of death and darkness into the realm of life and light (Jn 3:16-21); having the love of God poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, we are made partakers of the divine nature, living members of Christ Jesus, and fellow citizens of the Kingdom of heaven (Rom 5:5; 2 Pet 1:4; Eph 2:1-10, 11-22).

That is the gist of the development in my understanding of salvation. It was like hearing a familiar song in a new key.

This brings me back to the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper and to the conclusion of this conversion story. Every Sunday in the Divine Liturgy, we sing (and in the icons, we see) that Christ has conquered death by death and has by his Resurrection from the dead broken the gates of Hades; he then ascended bodily to the right hand of the Father on high, thereby opening the door to heaven for all who believe in him. The Church’s worship, including its visible expression in liturgy, ceremonies, buildings, images, and icons, flows from and leads to faith. Our liturgical life is a manifestation of our assurance of things hoped for and conviction of things not seen (cf. Heb 11:1) and a real participation in the same until the return of our Lord, when those who are in Christ will finally see him face-to-face. Faithful participation in the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church prepares us for that divine vision. Especially in the celebration of the Eucharist, we learn to cast aside all earthly cares, that we might receive the King of all. When the Eucharistic bread and wine are changed by the power of the Holy Spirit through the prayer of the priest so that they become the Body and Blood of Christ, we are mystically present with the Lord in heaven, with the angels and saints gathered in adoration of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Thus, there is even here and now sacred space, holy ground, where heaven and Earth meet and the faithful gather (Mal 1:11; Heb 10:19-22; 12:22-24; Rev 4-5).