In Praise of My Protestant Past

Suffice it to say that becoming Catholic was, without a doubt, the most difficult decision I’ve ever made in my life.  Seriously.
It wasn’t just because I used to believe Catholicism was a false religion.  It wasn’t just because I had so many negative memories of my Catholic beginnings.  It wasn’t just because I thought the Catholic tradition was dull and boring.  Granted, all these things were true for me.  But the most significant reason my reversion was such an agonizing decision was that I loved my Protestant life so much.  Could I really leave it all behind?  Could I really pay that price?
In a post for another day, I would love to highlight all the ways in which my reversion has in fact been anything but a downgrade in my Christian faith.  Being Catholic is the greatest part of my life.  But today I wish to make the record abundantly clear: my decade as a Protestant was a gift from God, a part of His plan for my life, and a strong foundation for the faith I have today.

A view from the pews, summer church camp 2004

I used to read Catholic conversion stories back before I ever considered converting myself.  I was so used to hearing stories of conversion from Catholicism; my interest of the reverse variety was a morbid curiosity.  On website after blog after forum thread I read the tales of former Protestants who stopped their protesting and embraced the Catholic Church.  In these stories I noticed a theme: the vast majority of these Catholic converts spoke highly of their Protestant roots.  Rarely did I read a conversion story in which the author spoke with scorn about his former congregation, whether it was Baptist, Lutheran, or “non-denominational.”  This was in stark contrast to the Catholic-to-Protestant stories (including my own) which were almost always full of contempt for the Church.  The former Protestants spoke of their newfound Catholic faith as a completion of what had begun in their hearts in the Protestant world – not an act of turning away.
And so it is for me.  Many people, upon learning of our conversion, express feelings of betrayal now that this doctrinal chasm separates us.  Surely to them, it may seem that we have abandoned our shared faith tradition.  Many friends may even have clever theological arguments to demonstrate that we now worship in two completely different contexts.  Though I’d wholeheartedly disagree, I know from experience what its like to learn that someone you love has converted to Rome.  It’s disorienting.  It’s confusing.  It can feel like betrayal.  Rest assured that the gap of the Reformation, the “Tiber River” as its referred to in some circles, is far shorter when viewed from the shores of Catholicism.  For the Catholic convert, the Church is consummation, the full realization of divinely-revealed Christian faith.  It is here in the Church that I look back upon a decade of Protestant faith with intense gratitude.
I’m grateful for my parents who dragged me to Sunday (and Wednesday!) church services even when I didn’t want to go.  Thanks, Mom and Dad.  At one point I actually started listening!
I’m grateful for my absolutely fabulous pastors, too numerous to name, who preached with conviction and taught me so much about Christian living.
I’m grateful for my Protestant friends who taught me how to pray, how to fellowship together in the name of the Lord, and how to serve others the way He served us.
Most of all, I’m grateful to God for my Protestant past.  The Holy Spirit has been working in my heart from day one and was abundantly present in every Christian Church, Protestant or Catholic, that I have ever attended.  In the Holy Spirit, fellowship with our Protestant brothers and sisters will continue with the ultimate hope that one day, “they may all be one” (John 17:21).  Here in the Church, we call this the “Communion of Saints.”  It is real, and it is everywhere.
Catholic apologist and respected author Mark P. Shea wrote a book called By What Authority: An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition.  I highly recommend the book for those studying Church Authority and issues of Tradition and Scripture (his books can be purchased HERE).  In his opening chapter, Shea writes a beautiful reflection on his own gratitude for his Protestant past.  My post today would be remiss without including an excerpt from Shea’s articulate thoughts, with which I heartily agree (excerpt posted with permission):

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill! –Ps 137:5
This is a book about a change of heart and mind.  Specifically, it is a book about how an Evangelical who believed the Holy Scriptures to be the sole source of the Christian revelation came to discover and embrace the ancient Catholic teaching that Sacred Tradition is a source of revelation too.
…But before we can get to where this book is going, it is vital (especially if one really takes Tradition seriously) to know where its author has been.  In the case of this particular book, this is true for two reasons.
First, this book is an attempt the chart the course of a long journey which occurred in my soul.  To do this, I had two options.  I could tell the story in the chronological order of events, hoping the reader would be able to make sense of the sprawling mess of intuitive leaps, backtracking, sudden storms of doubt, blank confusion, false leads, tedious hours of study, lucky breaks, prayer, and happenstance conversations that went into the turbulent process of thinking this issue through.  The problem with this approach is that it leaves the reader as confused in reading about my journey as I was in living it.
Therefore, as St. Papias said of a far greater Mark, this author opted instead to “write down accurately whatever he remembered, though not in order” or, at any rate, not in chronological order.  The resulting narrative has, I hope, much clearer lines while still remaining true to the fact that every single one of the questions addressed here are questions which I wrestled with at some point in my journey.
The second reason it is important to know where the author has been is because our culture is thoroughly dominated by the notion that “change” equals “repudiation of the past.”  Thus, not only is everyone from movie stars to political figures forever going through “phases,” but even in the Church we find people who assume that to change means to reject the past.  That is why the Christian world is awash in conversion stories, the accepted formula of which is:
1. I used to be one of the X’s.
2. Then I found out that:
a. Y’s were all right, and
b. Xs were all wrong.
3. Thank God I’m not an X anymore.
In short, the common picture of change in the modern (particularly American) world, both secular and religious, is of a man climbing a series of intellectual ladders and kicking each one down in scorn after he has reached some new plane of spiritual or intellectual growth.  Everything that got him to where he is now is outdated and – mark this – therefore false.
Don’t misunderstand.  I believe in the biblical demand for repentance and a decisive turning away from evil.  But this is not what we are talking about here.  Rather we are talking about a typically modern mind-set that tends to identify “previous” with “bad, disproved, ridiculous, and rejected.”  It is this mindset I wish, paradoxically enough, to reject at the outset.  I emphatically do not think it necessary or desirable to repudiate my Evangelical roots in order to embrace Sacred Tradition.  Indeed, the Tradition I have come to regard as revelatory positively insists that God’s grace builds on, rather than repudiates, the good things in God’s good world – including the great good thing called Evangelicalism.  Thus, just as the New Testament praises the Old, just as St. Paul praises his native Judaism (Rom 3:1-2), just as Christ fulfills rather than annihilates his Jewish roots (Mt 5:17), so I believe Catholic Tradition builds on all I received from Evangelicalism.
So before we talk about why I came to believe in the truth of Sacred Tradition, I believe it essential to count the core Evangelical growth rings on the tree of my Christian life and praise God for the good wood he gave me in my years as a Protestant.  Indeed, if what follows is to make sense, it can only do so in light of what God gave me through the first Christian community to which Christ called me after a life of fuzzy agnosticism.  That community was Protestant Evangelicalism.  It was largely through Evangelicalism that I became a believer in Jesus Christ at the age of twenty.  Likewise it was largely through Evangelicalism that the Holy Spirit laid all the groundwork for me to see and embrace Sacred Tradition as revelation.  Therefore, it is to these fine Christian people that I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude for the following reasons:
First and foremost, it was Evangelicals who showed me how to look to Jesus Christ as the source of salvation.  As I learned my faith from them, I learned that it is nonsense (and a terrible burden) to imagine I have to earn the free grace of God.  Instead, they taught me that God has already done the work of forgiving my sin and making a way for me to approach him through the Cross of Jesus Christ.  This is, of course, a basic message of Scripture.  But without the continual reminder of my Evangelical brothers and sisters, this truth was tough to hold on to at first.  So I am grateful that, by both word and deed, they drilled it into my head until it stuck.
….
… It was from Evangelicals that I learned believing, effective prayer.  They showed me that prayer is the first, not the last, resort.  “Pray first, then act” was the great principle I learned from Evangelicalism… But far greater than learning to trust God in “request prayer” was the Evangelical instinct to zero in on “worship prayer whether or not God ever granted such a request.  “Praise God!” was the great Evangelical exclamation I learned, an exclamation that marvelously sums up all of Evangelicalism…. For I have seen my Evangelical brothers and sisters offer prayers of praise to God in the depths of agony.  Not long ago I attended a funeral for a friend’s wife who had died suddenly.  They had been married four short years.  She was not yet thirty.  Her husband loved her as much as any man has ever loved a woman.  Yet the funeral was, by his choice, an act of praise to God first and only secondly an expression of his wrenching grief.  The courage and glory of it still grips my heart.  It was as brave and devout an act as any ancient martyr’s prayer.  But it does not surprise me, for I saw many such examples among Evangelicals of trust in him who went through death for us.  And by such examples I learned that prayer, though it involves request, must first involve adoration of God who he is, and not for what he might do for me in this life.  For he has already done everything by going to the terrible death of Golgotha and winning a place for me (and my friend’s wife and all the rest of us) at his Father’s right hand.  May God be praised for his many Evangelical saints who bear witness to this with the courage and integrity of my friend.
… These were people who passionately believed in the reality of the supernatural life and taught me to recognize that, without the present grace of Christ supporting and sustaining our every breath, there was nothing we could do.  They had nothing to do with either selfishness or with its flip side, religious do-goodism.  They rejected both as equal and opposite forms of godless self-sufficiency – mere schemes to earn brownie points with either God or man.  They were equally impatient with works righteousness (which they thought Catholics believed in) and the social gospel of some mainline Protestant church which reduces the Faith to politically correct involvement in the League of Women Voters.  For my Evangelical brothers and sisters, everything had to be rooted in Christ and aimed at union with him or it was regarded with suspicion as mere secular humanism.
Yet such a rejection of humanistic self-sufficiency did not mean a rejection of responsibility.  For, in Christ, these people were a dynamo of loving service to their neighbors.  This included pooling their money to help financially strapped members of the church, organizing youth ministries, organizing music ministries, helping struggling families get on their feet, working in pro-life activities, assisting college students, sponsoring Romanian, Polish, and Vietnamese immigrants in to the United States, and ardently pursuing various evangelistic endeavors…..They rejoiced over me when I made my submission to Jesus.  They taught me not to shy away from truth even when it was scary.  They taught me both to bend my knee like the sinner I am and lift up my head with the dignity of Christ.
But best of all, Evangelicals taught me to never be satisfied if God desires to give more.  Just as the Israelites followed the pillar of fire, so my Evangelical mentors in Christ were ardent about pursuing truth wherever it might lead.  They frequently reminded me of the wisdom of Paul: “Test everything.  Hold on to the good” (1 Th 5:21).
…It is this last point which is the launch pad for what follows.  For paradoxically, it was my struggle to defend the faith as Evangelical Christianity taught it that helped me see the Faith as Catholic Christianity teaches it, a Faith revealed not only by the Bible but by Sacred Tradition as well.  It was my Evangelical love of Scripture that led to my Catholic love of Sacred Tradition.  It was the solid Bible preaching of Evangelicalism that built the foundation in my mind and heart for the solid teaching of the Catholic Faith, And it is the Catholic Faith, revealed by both Scripture and Tradition, that is helping me fulfill the consuming desire of my Evangelical heritage: to be a faithful example and witness of Jesus Christ.
It is then out of gratitude for and obedience to my Evangelical and Catholic family in Christ that I bear such meager witness as I can to Sacred Tradition: gratitude for the heart cry of adoration taught me by my Evangelical family of faith and obedience to their steadfast commitment to truth, a commitment which has grown like the mustard seed into a love of the Catholic Tradition.  And most of all, I offer this work to the honor and glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so steadfastly served by my Catholic and Evangelical families, in the hope that by his creative, loving and unifying hand we may all, in the words of Paul, “reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God” (Eph 4:13).

Mark Shea blogs at Catholic and Enjoying It!  I feel a little starstruck that he personally responded to an email of mine this week.    If you like Catholicism, social justice, current events, and satire, head over to Mark’s blog and get ready for some awesome.  While you’re at it, buy his books!  You won’t be disappointed.