08/03/20 Dr. John Bergsma (JHT01708)

so well good evening and welcome to the journey home i'm marcus grodi your host for this program tonight's a return guest but he hasn't been on the program for a long time so dr john bergsma is joining us tonight he was on back in march of 2008 so we're going down 12 years and you're coming on your 19th anniversary every entrance into the church so john welcome back yep great to be back short drive down from stephenville but good to be here yeah you're not that far away but i don't get the chance to to run in you very much but it's the same it's good to have you here good to be here and i've read a number of your books that maybe we'll talk about uh later in the program but what we'd like to do since you were in the program before but it's been a while that we'd love to review your journey sure you know what cracks me up but sometimes we as years go by we remember things that opened us to the church that we kind of forgot last time or didn't quite appreciate yeah i wonder if that's true for you too oh i mean well you know when i look back at my life i always think of all roads lead to rome you know and the the uh the book i wrote stunned by scripture is about eight chapters or so uh and each one of them was a line of thought that ended up in rome you know and so the biggest one being the eucharist always but but the other lines all end up there so in reviewing it i see yeah many providential signs but you know just the the basics uh marcus so my dad was a navy chaplain right uh representing the christian reform church in um uh in the navy that's uh one of them one of the larger dutch calvinists i'm almost sure that if i'd listened to that program i would have said back then that your name ending with the ma makes sense that you were in christian reform yeah absolutely yeah yeah it's actually a friesian name uh friesians are a little ethnic minority among the dutch uh but all the dutch people whose names end with a they're all part of this little friesian group that's uh up on the barrier islands in the north sea and tall and lanky and all that um but uh but yeah so my father was a a calvinist a pastor 27 years in the u.s navy i grew up in that environment rubbing shoulders you know as military people do with a lot of different denominations including catholics and my family actually had many priest friends the later cardinal o'connor uh famously of new york was one of my dad's best friends actually in the u.s navy he was a cardinal o'connor was a navy chaplain uh rank or two ahead of my dad uh in the navy and uh we had great respect for him so i grew up in that environment having strong theological objections to catholics but then on a personal level admiring the obvious holiness of of most of the priests chaplains because you know i i trust it's still the same but our impression was that the priests that went into the military service just were stellar examples of of men of prayer and devotion would you have seen them like it's just a shame they're encumbered with all that catholic jargon but it's amazing what grace could do it in the midst of that he actually knows jesus yeah exactly yeah it's like you know barnacles encrusted on a ship but nonetheless the ship floats you know it's like what a shame that they have all this you know bells and smells but uh but we could you know tell that many of them uh loved jesus in fact i can remember uh when we were in new jersey uh when i was a child about four years old a couple of uh priest chaplains would come over to visit my dad periodically for dinner and so on we'd host them and one of them was so tickled because i had this red bible and it was a red letter edition it was my first bible king james of course because if it was good enough for saint paul you know it's good enough for us and so and uh and he would ask me now john why did you um why did you pick a red bible and i would always say for the blood of jesus which was indeed why i had picked the red vile parents had brought us to the store and let us pick out a bible i picked out a red one for myself and i realized later he was a precious blood father years later it dawned on me and that's why he was so tickled with that he used to have me come over and tell him once again why i had picked up but anyway um uh we're getting we're getting uh he would assume you were a budding catholic way back then yeah i mean there were a little bit of jesus yeah these little uh these little uh you know things like you said in hindsight you see them that god's kind of providentially uh guiding you did you get a faith from the being the pk of uh army chaplain well maybe yeah yeah yeah well i mean you know pk's have a terrible reputation and so did military kids so i was a double whammy doubly a brat right but i never really was i was a very straight arrow you know uh just uh no no irony never never was a rebellious kid i was just fully embraced my parents faith and uh my intention was to be a pastor myself you know eventually so we fast forward to maybe uh the late 80s so i'm graduating from high school uh out in hawaii where there's a marine corps air base out there my dad was serving and praying about what to do did well in school had a lot of options very clearly heard a word from the lord uh go into uh the pastoral ministry so tore up all my applications to different you know ivy league schools and whatnot and uh went to our denominational college in in west michigan and went through the whole pre-seminary track uh majored in greek and latin you know to be prepared for the seminary uh met my future wife got married because that was kind of expected you know whoever heard of a single pastor right all of that and um got right into uh seminary uh an interesting thing though marcus um and i don't know if i mentioned this on the last show but a a real quiet but important piece of the puzzle was when i was about to get married i went to my mother who i greatly respected and asked her advice on family planning and children and all that and she literally told me virtually quoting only the catholics have the right view of these things why don't you go and get pre-marital counseling from a catholic church um okay fine you know i was kind of okay with catholic we know a lot of catholics so it's kind of like on a personal level i was okay with catholics i had known catholics and priests like fine my mom said i believed in grace estate you know i'm not sure if we had that term but we believed in the concept so i thought my mother has grace estate so i went to the catholic information center in uh the city where we live in picked out a flyer for you know nfp from ccl you know didn't know what those acronyms meant and just went to this random catholic church with my fiance to you know do the several weeks training and natural fanning planning and what what came out of that was we got convinced that openness to life was the not just the catholic position but it was a traditional christian and it is yeah it's a traditional christian way of regulating uh family uh uh you know children and um and but but it's interesting how one domino goes down that leads to others that it's amazing that your mother it is had that inside and there's a story behind that because i was born in 71 and we were in hawaii at the time couple years later roe v wade my mother knew in her heart that roe voa was terrible so she started getting involved in pro-life advocacy but in that early stage there wasn't much of an evangelical pro-life movement so she found herself caught up with catholics who were doing pro-life movement word got back to the bishop of honolulu that this protestant lady is helping us out he was you know intrigued well can i meet her so that started a relationship where she worked with the bishop of honolulu as a liaison between catholic and protestant pro-life movements for several years so we lived in hawaii wow and out of that came her conviction that you know that the catholic church really had something about that so that is a really uh serendipitous isn't it i mean that really is god's providence doing that i i look uh one my wife and i when i was a pastor and this would have been in the 80s and my wife marilyn was a director of a crisis pregnancy center not far from here and but the majority of people she worked with were catholics and it was a witness of those catholics that was the seed that started her journey to the faith i'm kidding yes so i mean there it is we go all the way back i mean roe versus wade is what brought you into the church in a sense yeah yeah yeah and then that but but it's it's one domino after another so we beg we were open to life so we started having children but then i needed to get a job but then the only thing i could do was pastoral work and and since i wasn't out of seminary yet the only church that hired me with this very low-income inner city church that just needed somebody to preach so i started pastoring an inner city church and then in that experience of doing evangelization it really pressed these theological issues that that differ between catholicism protestant to me in an existential way like the crisis of church unity really hit me personally because i'm i'm pastoring this struggling church there's six other struggling protestant churches in the same neighborhood like what are we all doing why can't we get together and then i would get together with the other pastors and talk to them and and these doctrinal differences would come up even though we all professed sola scriptura and then i got shocked at how bad solo scriptura was in maintaining unity but then i was we had an ecumenical gathering of i forget whether it was promise keepers or something like that and and i was assigned to preach something on john 17. so i'm working on john 17 and jesus is praying for unity and i'm struggling with this contradiction you know clearly he wants you know i i could not bring myself to take the cop out that john 17 only requires some kind of spiritual unity because that that the line in 17 where our lord says that they may all be one that the world may know that you have sent me and i'm thinking what can the world know except for appearances the world is judging by appearances so he's got to be talking about visible unity it's visible unity which is a witness to the truth of christ's mission and and the the world can't perceive some kind of airy fairy ephemeral you know mere spiritual so i'm being caught in the these contradictions of the scriptures are really calling us to unity and yet soul of scripture is not doing it and i'm feeling it in a very personal way because day by day i see these struggling churches and my own struggling little church in this community and in the scandal and how it was hurting mission that's another thing that they may all be one that the world may know so unity marcus is tied to mission effectiveness in mission and when we're disunified mission is ineffective and i was seeing that firsthand because i would knock on people's doors and they would come and they'd find out i was a pastor and they'd be jaded already and they're like okay well what are you selling yeah because the charismatic pastor had been there and the pentecostal pastor had been there and like okay what's your brand of gospel you know at that time when you were recognizing in a visceral way the problem was solo scriptura were you were you you weren't probably open at all to say that well there must be something wrong with protestantism not per se you you there's something wrong with solo scripture right but because i remember when in my period thinking well the problem must be me it can't be the bible right it must be me yeah you know it can't be protestantism it can't be you know what i'm saying is where are you going to locate right the the issue yeah yeah it's kind of like uh you know uh you know paradigm shift you try to keep the paradigm going uh as long as possible before you shift paradigms our guess is dr john birdsmith i just want to make sure i mentioned the yeah i mean i think a lot of the guys we work with here get stuck right there they they see a problem but you're you're in a a rut if you will you're in this paradigm and how you're going to move from it where's the answer and who do you talk to to figure this out right yeah what about new members classes at that time oh we had them in our church so you got somebody who came from the methodist church or the baptist church this is this is what was so painful uh it was a mostly african-american church marcus and and many of the people that we brought in from the from the black community had a beautiful tradition you know the black baptist tradition is beautiful church of god and christ i admire that tradition and they were from that and i felt so bad i thought to myself who am i to introduce them to dutch calvinism maybe i should be helping them to reconnect with their roots in in you know the african baptist or you know and so i think you know i need to be confident that my doctrinal system is not just for dutch americans you know that it's for all people all races tongues and colors as we see in in revelation and this is another thing that was there's nagging on me and and and pushing me in that direction and you mentioned soul scripture i have to tell you that just i'll try to say this anecdote very quickly you know so in the dutch dutch calvinist community in this in this city so old theologian was very revered that was in retirement and he kind of held court at his house on saturday afternoon in seminarians and stuff would go over and talk to this this revered guy i got invited you know one time to go over and talk with him i'm like oh i'm going to talk with so and so this is going to be so great he'll answer all my problems some of these problems like soul scripture were going on my head already marcus and uh so we go over there and and introduced and we sit down and everybody's drinking coffee and he's pontificating i use the term advisedly he's spontaneous the other thing after listening for a little while i find out marcus he's not going to church anymore because he doesn't think that anybody in town has anything to teach him and he goes on a few minutes later he makes a comment about oh i don't need to be attached to any denomination or any prediction or congregation i just want to be a universal christian like john paul ii or billy graham i mean there's so many problems going on there first of all like you know uh ego and and stuff but but you know that doesn't even really work because john paul is clearly catholic billy graham was faithful to his denomination but he just didn't want to be unaffiliated he felt like he had risen to this like high level listen for a little while i got so mad at this guy you know it was obvious to me and his ego was really working and and i mustered the courage to raise my hand and and make an intervention and i said excuse me dr so and so but you know what your real problem is you are setting yourself up as your own arbiter of the truth and i felt really proud of myself i thought that was a nice phrase your own arbitrary truth you know bang like that and he looks at me without missing a beat and he said no well that is the protestant principle isn't it and he turns back to the rest to get to the conversation and my jaw drops to the floor he really said that marcus that the protestant principle is you are your own arbiter of of your truth i didn't realize that the logic of soul of scripture eventually leads you to that because you're left with the bible and just your interpretation of it he realized it but did not become catholic and just stayed in this kind of solipsistic kind of situation and but i was shocked i didn't want to be my own arbiter of the truth and that set off another nagging thing in the back of my head that wasn't going to bear fruit until a couple years later when my assignment ended at that church and i had to do something else and i decided to go get a degree for scripture and uh you know almost by happenstance uh i i sent a an application to the university of notre dame on a lark it was the only catholic school it was really it was the only theology department that i applied to i was going to old testament it was mostly like ancient nor eastern programs that i was applying to at state schools what do you know they come back to me with a big offer and a fellowship and stuff like that and and it was an offer i couldn't turn down so i go to i thought well this is gonna be great i'll go study they had an ecumenical faculty i'll study with protestants down there and get paid by catholics you know it's like robbing the egyptians you know and uh so i go down to the university of notre dame and then all these catholic things that we've been talking about you know natural family planning and soul scripture and not being your own arbiter the truth all that's going around in my head and uh and then god puts me in a position where uh i'm living in the subsidized married student housing which is the cheapest housing on campus and uh so who are you going to find among the grad student population you're seeking the cheapest housing well it's the catholic grad students that are open to life and if they're open to life that's probably because they're practicing their faith so here you go i'm thrown in with these great catholic young people who know their faith they're smart they're practicing it and and then it went to another chapter i was remembering i'm trying to remember was that john yeah the witness of the catholic families yes at notre dame yeah was really the witness i mean that was it wasn't the school it was the no it wasn't the school school's another time we could talk about that but but uh but yeah the um these these young couples who were raising children living on faith um were were smart and came from good families and could have done something else but we're making the sacrifices to be open to life and and giving such a joyful witness and that was really powerful so we felt a greater kinship with them than with our protestant peers who did not have children you know and that here's another way you know now you feel you feel yourself socially more accepted you know by by those in uh in the church and that that was that was a poll right there you know i think about that statement that that professor made what was that he said uh that that is the protestant principle yeah you you are your own arbiter yeah that's my accusation was you're making yourself your own arbiter of the truth and his reply was that's the protestant principle and you were experiencing that from a from a a reproductive standpoint where that the yes that the the protestants were their own arbiters right of deciding when it's going to happen when it's going to happen they were their own arbiters right nfp recognizes there's a sovereignty of god yeah in in this and a role that can't be usurped yeah so it it does involve yeah i mean it's it's doctrine in life you know they get integrated and and total abandonment divine providence often means accepting a child that you know that you're going to have to trust in god uh to raise and we we're in that i've been in that position many times so there was a uh in the journey of especially clergy the the needle goes from you know these catholics you know poor catholic want nothing to do with them too they weren't totally wrong on this or oh now i understand this okay they don't really believe this so it's okay they're at least a catholic church or at least excuse me at least a christian church right you know but my guess is that you and your wife are along this they're right on this they're right on this but at what point in there did it ever start crossing your mind that there might be a mandate that i might we may ought to yeah consider yeah i mean it's one thing to say there's all at least accept them as a church exactly yeah so my uh the man who later became my sponsor it's almost the first one of the first people i met on campus he was in the doctoral program michael um a couple years ahead of me in the uh in the program and uh i was so impressed by his cheerfulness um his his being you know well i like to phrase it this way he had three qualities i never thought i'd find the same person uh he was full of holy spirit highly intelligent and catholic and i didn't see how you could get all three and the same person without exploding you know and so he was like the burning bush to me like like a self-contradiction i didn't see how he didn't just combust from like how can you be so knowledgeable and yet stay in the catholic church uh because because all the catholics i had met before i tended to to excuse them as either being ignorant and that's why they were were in the church or indifferent you know indifferent would be not full of the holy spirit and ignorant would be not highly intelligent but he was clearly full of the holy spirit and highly intelligent and had consciously chosen to stay in the catholic church i was absolutely fascinated so we would meet together uh marcus and he would beat me at my own game i would throw these uh scriptural challenges at him that i would use when i was doing urban ministry to you know to buffalo non-practicing catholics and try to convert them and so on and he would you know parry them and come back with something else from scripture that i never read all those catholic verses i think we've talked about this before all right right yeah and uh and he would come back with these catholic verses that like well i of course i've read that what you know but you know so one time i challenged him on marius queen of heaven and he comes right back with revelation 12 and goes through an exegetes set and i i was dumbfounded that it was more cogent his explanation of revelation 12 was more cogent than than explanations from baptists that i had heard growing up you know big into revelation right all the baptists have their charts and i would hear their explanation like oh come on you know this is really wild but here's this catholic making this explanation of um a mary an interpretation of revelation 12 in a very cogent way and so that got the needle to wow the catholic church is a christian church and they can defend their positions by scripture but then getting the neil to they've got a better explanation than mine you know i was like well i've got my own explanation it's about as good as his explanation so it's just two alternative paradigms whose explanatory power seem to be about equivalent but then michael started to push me and say well why don't we get into the fathers and see which paradigm the fathers and let the fathers be the tipping point right so he got me to read the apostolic fathers and to make this brief once i got into ignatius of antioch and you know everything about ignatius hivanic was rocking my world but when it got to the point where he said stay away from those who refuse to confess the eucharist to be the flesh of our savior jesus christ which suffered for our sins and which the father in his goodness raised up so you remember you see the eucharist is the flesh not who was raised it's the person that jesus in some way no the flesh which was raised and i sorry which suffered and which was raised you know very tangible you know it's it's almost like the the the corpse you know that would be a pejorative way to put it but you know the body okay and it was such a clear testimony to the real presence so early only maybe 10 years after the death of the apostle john and and within a few moments of reading i thought to myself it's too quick for him to have gotten mistaken in just a decade you know so forget that unless you're going to take a mormon position like goes to heck as soon as john dies you know like i'm not going to go there i'm not going to be that ridiculous yeah so it's too quick for for ignatius so therefore this must represent what ignatius had received from the apostles you know and then i thought of myself oh my gosh all those passages in the new testament that just the plain sense is that it's his body they really meant that that's really how they took it and and so all those gears churned in my mind for about 36 hours and then bang i knew i had to become catholic it was that passage it was ignatius of antioch letter to the smernians end of chapter six beginning of chapter seven and it was a day and a half and then i knew for the sake of the real presence even if the papacy was wrong even if the marian doctrine's wrong just for the sake of the real presence alone i knew i had to become catholic and of course your wife was all ready to jump with you right not quite but she was coming and come back after a break because that's often an issue yeah you've got two people on the scene are they on the same path and i'll work let's come back to that a little bit uh our guest is dr john bergsma before we go to the break just want to remind you to go to chnetwork.org the website for coming home network international where you will find lots of conversion stories journey stories like john's as well as resources to help you on your own journey so we'll be back in just a moment more of dr berg welcome back to the journey home dr bergson out during the break we're solving all the problems of the world but we'll set that aside as we get back to his journey on marcus schrodinger your host and our guest is dr john bergeron's author of many books before we get on the journey of all your books which one you want to mention real off quick to make sure they grab well let's say stunned by scripture how the bible made me catholic yeah okay that would be a good one i mean you have an introduction to the bible yeah i do yeah uh catholic introduction to the bible old testament would just be projected to volume uh new testament volume's not out yet but the old testament's out that's with brant petry and and then if people want want to get into scripture or want to get their family members into scripture you know bible basics for catholics and then new testament basics all basically have one for for children too um i have i have a book for seekers okay called um yes there is a god and other answers to life's big questions that's right but it's really for all ages secrets of all ages and it's actually my favorite book it's my shortest book was the hardest to write explain explain the faith without using any religious jargon whatsoever to a person on the street who has no religious background that was the challenge that is neat yeah i remember that yeah still my favorite but all right so well good i wanted to make sure the audience knew about that so my question is that you were you know the eucharist there you are and i was just wondering you know where your wife was at and all this yeah yeah so she was on a similar road uh but maybe uh you know a couple miles behind um but she was having her own experiences um she she was hanging out with the catholic ladies in the community and the catholic ladies would meet to pray the rosary at first my wife would just go and let them pray the rosary and then hang out for social reasons and then after a while she picked up how to pray the rosary but but my wife tells a funny story uh uh she was used to wives getting together and um we had some dutch term for it clashing or something like that it's basically you know complaining about your husband and your kids and uh so she would start this up with these with these uh young young catholic wise and um and they wouldn't jump in they would just be quiet and then change the conversation and it was uh so noticeable and so unlike you know the social environment that my wife was used to that after a while she asked one of her friends like you know how come nobody does that and then a friend said well you know as catholics we we understand that these these these sufferings if are part of our sanctification if we join them to the sufferings of christ they lead us to holiness and so if we complain about them then we're rejecting them and then they're not being they know that then they don't become an avenue of holiness for us and so basically explain to my wife the whole theology of redemptive suffering and we didn't have a theology of redemptive suffering or maybe it was in some corner but was not something that we talked about our view was more like uh jesus suffered so you don't have to right he took the suffering now you can live a good life right now this idea of participating in christ's sufferings and but you know initially it doesn't sound like too much fun to participate in christ's suffering but the fact of the matter is marcus we're all going to suffer and if you have a theology that allows you to harness that suffering for a good end it's it's a makes it a lot easier to live life and and besides the fact that's just true okay but my wife was so moved by the theology of redemptive suffering because she had a lot of suffering in her life and continues to have a lot of suffering and um she thought these catholics really have something here and that was so moving and then she through the through the through the praying of the rosary she began to develop a relationship with a blessed mother and so it you know it wasn't long it was about three weeks i decided to become catholic and about three or four weeks later my wife consented and agreed so it wasn't like big clash of the titans like scott and kimberly hahn or anything it's very peaceful and i'm glad for that my wife and i are both introverts and uh we we we value peace very highly you know i'm thinking about your description of your wife's discovery of the theology of suffering it reminds me of that scripture in romans eight now as calvinist we were really into romans right but there's a little section in romans 8 that i just never saw provided we suffer with him provided we suffer right what did you do with that before i don't know there's so many of these passages mark i just where i think to myself now how did i understand that before and it was it's kind of like this you know you cert you don't see certain you know psychologists talk about you don't see things that don't fit your paradigm you know and but i never i never paid i never attended to passages like that yeah provided myself why did we suffer yeah yeah that's a strong statement it is it makes it sound like it's necessary provided we suffer so those catholic wives were we're almost saying that there's a grace here but i will sacrifice that grace unless i accept right the suffering right yeah the embrace of the suffering releases the grace yeah that's our consent that enables god to work in our lives yeah yeah wow so you a couple weeks when you two were ready to did it take a while though to to jump the hoop or yeah yeah so so we we agreed that we want to become catholic and then i had a priest friend who was in the doctoral program with me he was a priest of the diocese there in south bend i sent him a cryptic email what must i do to be saved he wrote me back a very tactful polite email said like do i mean to understand that you're interested in reconciling with the roman church or something like that and it's like yes absolutely that's what you mean he was over in about an hour you know he was like dang he was he was over with a catechism and he talked to us and uh gave us our first well it wasn't really our first catechism but it was our nicest catechism and uh and he said i'm gonna exempt you from rcia and we're just going to schedule this with a bishop schedule and so we were received in february 24th of 2001 it was a the the saturday vigil before ash wednesday it's an odd time to become catholic but there's a few days of celebration then lent starts but that's kind of how it was too because the the doo-doo really hit the ventilator when our families when we had to inform our families you know and then we got every kind of reaction from indifference to violent anger and vitriol you know so the whole spectrum of responses yeah did uh i've heard converts say this before that um it's possible you could become a frenchman in a year but it might take a lifetime bef before a frenchman mistakes you for a frenchman you know it takes a while yeah yeah exactly become a catholic fairly quickly right but to become a catholic yeah talk about that journey both theologically catholic you know seeping into how you understood the scriptures your catholic doctrines that were so much a part of you right your marriage and all the other issues yeah yeah it's been a real transformation um uh my vocabulary has changed you know i now commonly say our lord and our blessed mother that's a linguistic habit i certainly never had before you know but out of deference to their holy names you know it's a term of endearment and affection uh so i mean my my vocabulary has changed my habits of prayer change but you know i'll say this marcus i thought that i understood the scripture as well and i didn't think that i had a lot to learn about scripture by becoming catholic boy was i wrong okay entering the church and beginning to read the scriptures through the lens of the fathers and then assisted by good friends like you know our good friend scott hahn and others into you know seeing the covenants understanding how they culminate in the in the new covenant which is the eucharist i mean you know this is the new covenant in my in my blood right luke 22 20. and uh that just brought the scriptures it was like i was i was watching in black and white and i loved the movie and i thought the movie was so great but then it goes into technicolor you know and so my appreciation of the scriptures is so vastly uh expanded and one of the things i love about being catholic marcus is the way our our liturgical year has us hang out in certain parts of the scripture according to the liturgical years so we just you know easter has recently passed we hung out in acts for all of easter and i read it with my family we read a chapter night uh you know as a family and but the neat thing about being catholic is you're still we're always living in acts you know you got the apostles and we still got these successors of the apostles you got peter and we still got the successor of peter you know um the you've got the basics of holy orders is there you got the gospel going out to the nations you have the breaking of bread which is the eucharist being celebrated and it's like in 2000 years it says nothing's changed we're we're still living in acts you know and um and and that's true so many parts of scripture we're still living in the scriptural world as catholics and when i was a protestant and would preach from acts i always felt like oh there's this big gulf you know it's like i would see the unity of the church back there and its structure and and you know the leadership of the apostles and the presbyters and then i would look at you know my tradition as it was and it seemed so divorced from from that reality it was always the acts chapter two movement which was always you know let's get back let's get back somehow well you know well hey you don't need to get back because we never left you know and uh and so having that fulfillment of um of uh really having the scriptures come to life through typology through understanding the covenants through understanding their sacramental fulfillment ah the gospel of john my favorite gospel so he comes alive the sacraments are the key to the gospel of john the seven signs of the of of the gospel they they are foreshadowings of the sacraments in various ways and once you see that it's like oh that's the key you know i used to want to preach from john but never knew what to say about it well this is a great miracle it happened you know it's great jesus changes water to wine that's super that we can't do that anymore but he did it then like what do you what do you do with that principle how do you preach that but when you understand all the eucharistic symbolism there that the servants call before john calls them diaconoy you know not dual oi you know so the hearers will get the sense that oh yeah just as the diakonoi distributed the wine from the six jars at that miracle so the diagonally distribute the elements of the the eucharistic liturgy here wherever we're celebrating in you know 105 a.d or what what have you you know just so so i i you know that that is my appreciation for scripture just uh just um uh taken off um but by having come into the church and experience the sacrifice our guest is dr john bergsma you mentioned john in different way has seen it another thing in john besides john 6 and so many things in there was when i looked through the lens of of the individualism of protestantism at john 14 15 16. i saw john or jesus promising the holy spirit to everybody yeah and it was until later recognized now wait a second yeah his initial promise was to the apostles yes and there's significance there yeah absolutely yeah you know things like uh you know the spirit will lead you into all truth you know when you just apply that to any group of christians like oh you know what do you do with that because there's such discord you know uh but when you understand as a pro a promise to the apostles as a college you know then that that's you know the infallible voice of an ecumenical council that's something that has some teeth to it that's why we can trust this book yeah right which is verified you know endorsed by ecumenical councils exactly it's it's a self-supporting system you know but yes you know reading john and understanding that uh you know there's promises being made to the apostles oh john 20 22 and 23 he breathed on them and said to them receive the holy spirit who sins you forgive or forgive them whose sins you retain or retain you just say oh that's a model for every believer like what each of us has the personal discretion to absolve the sins of others but if you read it with the rest of the church with the tradition say no i mean this is a special promise to the apostles and their successors as leaders of the community not to mention the promises to peter in 21 you know to feed the sheep kind of universal pastor the catholic paradigm and saul becomes alive and we still have peter and we still have the you know john and james and the rest of them in the sense of their successors and so we're still living in john you know this is the imminency of the scriptures yeah got an email becky from long island right so i'm a cradle catholic and i've always been happy to be catholic in chatting with some non-catholic friends recently i realized that i unfortunately lack a solid knowledge of the bible i'd like to become more familiar with scripture to be able to knowledgeably converse with my friends what tips could you give me for how to get started and what to focus on yeah so you would say leviticus absolutely everyone starts leviticus or numbers you know well the jews actually do start la vegas that's a different story that's to learn hebrew i actually wrote a book precisely for this marcus it's called bible basics for catholics uh by ave maria press and i would recommend to uh you say becky was it yeah that that she pick up that book and start there and that will give her a whole overview of scripture and help her to understand and it's a very easy book to under to to access i mean i i literally use stick figures to draw all of the different stages of salvation history out and if you can draw a stick figure you can get it but it's all the things about the story of scripture that i wish i had been told when i was 12 years old and begun reading the bible and actually didn't find out until i was 30 years old i didn't understand how the bible fit together as a story as a coherent story until i was about 30 years old and and i had almost had a doctorate in scripture already and two master's degrees in theology and i'd find like oh it's these covenants you know they fit together you know so uh yeah bible basics for catholics and then new testament basics for catholics goes into deeper in the new testament will give more specifics on some of those passages that she might want to discuss with her protestant friends yeah probably the most read chapter in the bible i'm guessing is genesis 1. because people say okay i'm going to start to read the bible so where do again why begin beginning and then they don't then there's different degrees of how far they get through exactly genesis so when when someone says where do i start yeah where would you recommend i mean besides oh if you're just gonna pick up the vial and read for the first time i would say gospel of mark shortest gospel i i truly believe it was written as an introduction to the faith some say john and john is good you know you're not going to go wrong by reading the gospel of john but actually it was written for people that have been catechized and and there's a lot in john that that's missed there's a lot of job that anybody can get but yeah i would start with mark yeah yeah i i i agree with you completely on that i remember when when i was a seminar when we were studying evangelization that was the book that we used to build how to do inductive bible study from from mark yeah that was the key another email uh carol from oklahoma since becoming catholic what are some of dr bergman's favorite connections he's discovered between judaism and the catholic faith oh my goodness uh i've written a book about this too it's called jesus and the dead sea scrolls that came out last year and yeah i mean there's there's so many things but let me try to keep this brief but when you get to the centuries right up before the birth of our lord you get jewish communities like the essenes that's the name of the community that left us the dead sea scrolls that are doing very christian looking like things okay they're gathering together for a daily meal of bread and wine they are washing in water frequently which they believe is being used by the holy spirit to forgive their sins um they are practicing celibacy like christian monasticism they're led by uh by a mabaker if you translate that into english it comes out as bishop okay so fascinating fascinating things and but this is pre-christian and they are developing these practices of piety from reflection on the prophets of israel you know and and some would use that to undermine the christian faith but i say no no we've always only claimed to be the fulfillment of what the prophet spoke and this is what paul says when he's on trial and acts he says i'm here because i believe the prophets right so our faith is that we believe the prophets has been fulfilled in christ i think that these groups got ahead of themselves and you know they were doing things that they should have waited for the messiah for um but but they are on the right track and it shows a very smooth continuity between the way that god was leading the people of israel and then through the the jewish period when it was just you know the descendants of judah at least visibly that were left you know into the coming of the new covenant and and really you know preparing you know it's like like john the baptist says in the desert prepare a way for the lord and some of these groups like specifically the dead sea scrolls community they were out in the desert and they were unwittingly preparing the way for christianity uh by by their understanding of the prophets you know this is something and correct me if i'm wrong that the catholic church is much more open to than any of our backgrounds and that is that that god works outside the church even in other religions to prepare people that's true yes you know so we'll see you know meditation in other faiths yes that is very similar and the the bad interpretation is saying see it doesn't matter right no we see that as a vestige right of of the truth yes that god that we can as missionaries build on right to bring people to christ yeah yeah there's a couple of books that come to mind you're probably familiar with the eternity in their hearts it's a protestant book on you know preparation and other cultures for the coming of the gospel i can't remember the author you would probably know and uh then um um uh i think it's roy valdez i think it is a catholic an east indian catholic wrote a book called the christ connection where he showed anticipations of the gospel in hinduism and traditional chinese religion and other world religions so there's really something to that another reason why we're more open to it marcus is that we have those missing old testament books that really cover that 400 years of silence that we used to talk about when we when we stopped with malachi and that we believe that god was working through that period and that's the period when say the dead sea scrolls were written and so i think that that also helps us to be more open that yeah you know during the period of maccabees and suffering god was still working sovereignly to to prepare when you know when uh the pioneers uh came across america and encountered native americans and then then learned their religions like whoa where'd you get that from sounds awful a lot like a parallel with the the scriptures you know and so we we see these uh seeds yeah of reality yeah are there and the early church fathers were thinking the same thing through the hebrews they have their hebrew scriptures well justin martyr and others are wondering well in the greeks are there also threads yeah come up through yeah and there's speculation you know socrates as you know some kind of a pre-christian you know could he uh could he be saved but uh that's that's true and you know scholars have pointed out you know tibetan buddhism with uh with us headed by a llama and so on the structure looks so similar in many ways to a catholic structure what i think marcus is that our hearts cry out you know for that family of god which is uh which subsists as we were talking earlier in the catholic church and even starting with something that's so very different than the gospel which is like the message of siddhartha gautama how people's desires to be in that family god can recreate something that looks like you know the catholic church and yeah i think it answers to kind of a an archetypical need the image of god yeah you know and conscience i mean there's a whole bunch of connections there that we as calvinists didn't quite appreciate as much as much got another email see we can squeeze one more in maura from louisville how would you suggest i respond to a protestant friend who doesn't believe in the sacraments and believes that things like water baptism or communion are at best symbols of our faith but do nothing to inwardly transform us yeah well i would you know i've got a chapter on on eucharist and a chapter on baptism in my books done by scripture and i would recommend maybe she pick that up and and take a look because i showed there that uh in scripture after scripture you know the plain sense is for example baptism saves you okay this you know noah's flood symbolizes baptism which now saves you you know this is my body uh if you drink unworthily you you are guilty of the body and blood of christ you know so the the statements about baptism and eucharist that we find in the new testament are always very direct always very real and i i thought well no it can't be that it can only be metaphor but when you look at the dead sea scrolls community this is where judaism comes in when they talked about their practices they also clearly had a very real sense no when they watched they thought something was really happening to them you know so so this is not some later medieval superstition this is rooted in the the realism of judaism at the time of our lord and that that comes over into christianity and we have you know all of us as christians need to get out of this habit of thinking that the apostles were always just speaking in symbols and metaphors when they made these statements and yeah and then the fathers and the other early christians you know they confirm it because they understood the apostles in the plain sense of these the eucharist and baptism yes are so clear in the father's the baptism from the earliest days the necessity of that and recognize that it's different right and steve ray's crossing the tiber his appendix where he traces the fathers on baptism and eucharist if anybody wants a quick easy resource for the fathers on those two sacraments i'd say stephen ray crossing the tiger really impacted me you mentioned mark as that wonderful book to begin with well it says if you believe and are baptized you will be saved yes if you don't believe you will why does it mention baptism well if you don't believe you're not going to be baptized exactly you know but baptism is a part of that little simple uh formula exactly um now wow we got a minute left what are the gazillion things that i could could bring in here the audience out there there's a calvinist sitting right there what's the one thing you'd want to say to him to be open to the church right what i want to say is look calvin had great respect for saint augustine and in the in the institutes of the christian religion which i know well i had to study many times he seems like he quotes augustine on almost every page so if there's a calvinist out there i would encourage them pick up augustine's writings pick up augustine's easy to read classic on christian doctrine and just read augustine yourself and ask now does augustine sound like a catholic or does augustine sound like a calvinist yeah i think i know what you're going to conclude when when you read on christian doctrines so that's one thing i would say john marcus great great pleasure to have you back it's great to see you again too and our prayers for you and your family thank you for your continued work and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home i do pray that once again hearing john's journey to the faith is an encouragement to you and an encouragement to open this wonderful book called the scriptures and if you're not accustomed to doing that as he suggested just open up the gospel of mark and just one little paragraph at a time and ask the lord to guide you and i guarantee you he'll draw you closer to you god bless you you

Channel: EWTN

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Id: bUZUfZDM0AI

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020