Journey Home - 2012-11-05 - Former Baptist-Presbyterian - Marcus Grodi with Brian Besong

good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program once again I have the opportunity of an introducing to you a man who following our Lord Jesus Christ was open to the beauty of the fullness of the church Brian B song is here former Baptist and Southern Baptist and Presbyterian and Brian it's welcome it's good to have you on the journey on the program it's nice to be here pulling you a little bit away from your PhD studies and philosophy that's okay well I'm anxious that actually later in the program ask you how your study of philosophy had input on your journey yeah as well as the need for that and we talked about that as we get later in the program but first of all I usually ask my guests to take a long step back and give the audience a little snippet of your early spiritual journey sure well I was as you mentioned I was raised Southern Baptist but my early earliest memories were disciples of Christ my dad had been from Pennsylvania and he was brought up in a Catholic family large Catholic family and he got a scholarship to Houston Baptist University on in gymnastics well he was Catholic well that's all I know go and you know get a free education but he met my mom and soon after they he left the Catholic Church and went to Protestant Church the disciples of Christ that at that particular church was liturgical II similar enough to the Catholic faith that he was used to for him to feel comfortable with the switch and so my earliest memories were disciples of Christ and you know one of the things I was raised in and my youngest use there one of the earliest memories I have was the frustration of I want to be baptized and they wouldn't let me I wasn't old enough yet and so I was explained everything while I needed to have faith in Jesus and I have that and and I needed to be at least they weren't definite but at least like thirteen or fourteen before they can take it seriously the profession of faith so I know the disciples that was a strong view of the Eucharist right yeah I couldn't member what their view of the baptism was or why they were there was it more like a Southern Baptist view of baptism honestly I don't know it wasn't too long after that that my parents decided to switch from that church to a Baptist mega church and so that's where my sort of my earlier formation really occurred and so this was a church that a little bit later on they formed a satellite and they helicoptered the the pastor from the one Church to the other it's uh yeah they have their own bowling alley and things like that so a lot of works of switching but in any race so they had it was a very large Church there's three levels and you know mega church and the each Sunday there would be an altar call and so by the time I forget exactly what age I was but maybe 10 ish I responded to an altar call and and so I sort of spontaneously got up out of the Pew and I went to one of the people in the front and I prayed the sinner's prayer and then soon after that they assured me and the family to a sort of back stage she might say area where they counted me and what that meant and then they asked my parents to become members because I don't think they were at that point yet and and so that sort of spurred them into maybe a little bit deeper into that church and so and your dad's movement from his childhood Catholicism into disciples of Christ and then Baptist Church did he have a a a serious turn away from the Catholic faith or was it more of just you know his movement I don't know he's not I know that intellectually he was inclined to continue to think Catholicism was true as after my conversion it didn't take much I think for him to to see what I was telling him was true about the Catholic faith and so he was he quickly moved back intellectually into the Catholic faith in his youth but I think it pretty much just put it on the back burner yeah I think so and I think it didn't influence you in a negative way against the Catholic Church no not at all in fact I remember him mentioning as I grew up that he would have debates with these euston baptist university students about the Catholic faith and how they were very anti-catholic and how he would try to say well it's not so bad you know let's take a step back so I remember him telling me that it's a young man and so it was definitely not a negative influence about Catholicism so after I was you came forward and accept that Savior in the typical Baptist fashion right and I was baptized in a second-floor baptistry and the full view of the three floors of the mega church and and so that was my baptism but we were I was I grew up in Houston and houstonians get used to driving hours for anything and I think it's about a 45 minute to an hour drive to get to church on Sunday well I think that eventually took its toll with my parents and so we switched from the mega church to a smaller local Baptist Church and that's where I spent most of my early teens but you know I was active I I cared about my faith as a young man and so I was not yet old enough to be part of the youth groups at that church so I started to go into youth groups at other churches and so I was part of a local I believe is a non-denominational youth group and then soon after I joined up with the youth group at a evangelical Presbyterian Church and as I sort of progressed and we saw evangelical prosit with the Capitol yeah the EPC was EPC yeah and so I was sort of concurrently members of the youth group sat at a certain point the Baptist and the epc and and I think I would attend both of them sort of concurrently depending on my mood I guess so where you were one of those then that that experienced the the power of the influence of youth ministry you draw you into the faith as well as into the active part of the church then yeah I would say so I definitely say so and as a part of that at the epc Church I participated in - sort of mission trips to Mexico and so that was that was I think it was fun I don't know how much it influenced my faith my my motives were not like I need to serve the poor or anything like that it's like all my friends are going and so I'm sure there's always mixed motives with these things but well actually intended I mean you just like taking kids on ski trips well you know most of them are going to go up because they want to ski but you're hoping yeah that the opportunity will be a way for the Holy Spirit to touch their hearts sure you know that yeah if you only limited it to those kids that are actually committed to the mission you might get one or two yeah can't build homes like that so it was it was a during one of these youth groups youth group mission trips that I was first introduced to Calvinism and it was a debate with my youth pastor I I believed that there was free will and he said no read Romans nine and so soon have pull out the Bible read Romans nine sort of in shock well that seems to suggest this is not my choice and so that debate was soon after ended and I became a sort of intellectual convert to Calvinism from that point forward and the the pastor of that church often would tell people about me as look at if you want to see a good convert to Catholicism look at Brian be song and so I was I was firmly convinced and maybe that be can you looking back a lot of the audience won't know what your position would have been at that point I mean how firmly did you believe that an individual human being does not have freedom of the will to choose for God well I was fairly firmly convinced it during this this time period I read other books as a sort of progression of that line of thought so I I read books by it like aw pink and I loved the systematic theology of Wayne Grudem I I got this as a young high schooler and I sort of read through this and so the more I read the more sort of firmly convinced I became and and at that point communism was for me a notion of salvation you know choice and bondage of the will and that sort of thing as I progress Calvinism became a little bit more deep to me though I was always young so it I don't know how how much I knew really about that but yeah so so firmly convinced was I have Calvinism that as a high school graduation gift family friends gave me the complete works of John Calvin on CD and things like that so but yeah so after I was sort of intellectually confirmed in this Calvinist theology I picked up books by Wayne Grudem and AW pink and I started running Bible studies for my high school friends and so we would go through like the the tulip you know the and so we I would sort of try to convince them tulip yeah so I'm pretty liberal to total total depravity and conditional election limited atonement irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints so the basic notion is the it's a sort of capstone of Calvinist theology but so I would I would try to persuade my friends and and it was not easy I remember at one point a girl crying from I think about this this Calvinist notion of salvation but I was very intellectually inclined to that and so I I also I love the works of Cornelius Van Til who was a well known among Calvinists apologist who sort of thought that he could apply Calvinism notion of the the fall of reason to apologetics so so the corruption of reason you wouldn't give common ground to the atheist and trying to convince them of things using their corrupted reason rather you show them that they're already presupposing God in a number of ways and so at any rate I was very we have that whole movement of the Dutch Calvinists yeah right and francis schaeffer would have been in ray and the reason we mentioned these names of many of you out there listening I've heard some of these names and it they fit into this category but strong Calvinism but then trying to therefore address philosophical ideas of trying to make it explain the philosophies of our world yeah based on the presumption that man has lost his free will to do anything good to get him right with God right and I suppose I should take a step back and and maybe explain a little bit of what made me so intellectually inclined in addition to being convinced of the sort of truth of these ideologies I remember I was as I mentioned going to this Baptist youth group and it was not that much different than the youth group at the epc but one thing that stood out was that the sort of youth pastor was an excellent preacher and the band was excellent and everything was exit fog machine lights it was a show and and the youth group over time became bigger and bigger and bigger and I remember we held a sort of like event at the local like a local pavilion and there was like big crowds you know fifty to a hundred at a time at for the altar calls and things like this so at a certain point I remember the the youth group got to I believe three or four hundred young people at each Wednesday night session and and I would see the strong sentiments being evoked by singing the praise and worship music and hearing these stirring messages of the love of Jesus and I could see the effects of those things for instance some of my friends would go to multiple altar calls you know and pray the sinner's prayers you know repeatedly and that sort of left an impression on my mind but the stronger impression that was left was when the youth pastor decided that he actually had a vocation to regular pastorship and not being associated with use anymore but with adults and so he and it seemed rather abrupt at the time he left the youth group and I remember a group of three or 400 people diminished to approximately 50 people within a matter of two or three weeks and the impression that was left on my mind was look this is sentimentalism the the relationships that are being formed here between a person and Jesus are largely a matter of the good feelings that are being evoked by these these sorts of things so at that point I was very strongly moved against us what I perceived to be a sort of sentimentalism in the faith so even though I would have said at the time and and still on that I would have a personal relationship with Jesus as a sort of you know this is the the terms used by most evangelicals especially is this personal relationship and I would certainly have affirmed that but I also thought of the faith as being more intellectually rigorous and having more content than a mere well you believe Jesus is the Son of God you believe in the Trinity and you sing praise and worship music and so so I started to move more and more into the intellectual side of the faith and thinking through these issues were you also at the time seeing that there was kind of a contradiction between Tulip that strong Calvinist view and the very means of which you were reaching people with altar calls and such you know there there's I don't know if it's historically true or not but it seemed that there was for example that the Calvinists were the the last to get involved in the missionary movements yeah because they believed so strongly in the sovereignty of God right you arrange things then if the if those in the deepest parts of the world are going to be saved God can do it because whether they're saved or not is totally up to God right not up to me going and trying to convince them mm-hmm but yet your whole church experience at that point was about trying to convince right right well at the time I would have and in fact I remember now that you mentioned at a debate that I had with one of the assistant pastors of the church that he was opposed to Calvinism for that very reason is that tends to make people sort of still and and not try to be active in proselytizing and so I disagreed with him because I thought well look well obviously obligated to do these things and and the other stuff is sort of background right if someone's coming up and doing an altar call it's because of that irresistible grace and if they fall away afterwards it's because they were never one of the Saints that is supposed to persevere and so I I don't think that at the time I would have seen any contradiction but I was very intellectually convinced and so I remember there's always an out clause explanation if they fell away uh-huh well they confess with their lips that they didn't believe in their heart so there's always an out clause yeah with that but the question is you know what is that you know the relationship between the actual living out of the faith and will you practice it and what you believe okay and I'm sure that's a part of the journey later but yeah I remember that being in the same boat you know actually having altar calls from my Presbyterian Church uh-huh yet I was a staunch Calvinist yeah really doesn't make sense right and I think I remember reading like Charles Spurgeon or something like that saying something against altar calls too because it it just smacks too much of an on Calvin stealth attitude towards salvation but at the time I sort of thought that these were these are perfectly fitting means to get people to feel that irresistible grace and to move to God so as you can probably imagine when it came to choosing a college I wanted Calvinism and and so at first actually at you know being a young man I didn't know too much and so I I thought that Moody Bible Institute sounded good and so my dad and I went to Chicago and we took a tour the University and and I was in the book shop I like to look at book since I looking at books and I I strike up a conversation with someone who's also there and I asked him a little bit about the the school and I said you know what like are they Commodus here and he's like well I I suppose some are they're all dispensationalists though and I actually didn't know that much about dispensationalism prior to that but when I got home I started looking up a lot about dispensationalism and I was convinced that was not the school for me and so at a time when it actually came time to choose a school why I chose Calvin College and there was a few Calvinist schools but that was the one that I sort of thought of as the one for me and it's actually the only college I applied to access I was so into the owners of staunch Calvin a school a Calvinist area a seedbed yeah that's right and it's a sort of all Western Michigan sort of gets influenced by that sort of CRC movement up there and so I I started in college and my inclination was to do missionary work so I started off with the inclination to do a theology and philosophy major and took my first theology class and and the chair of the department was the one who was teaching it and there was very little Calvinism that was believed by as far as I could tell most of the people in the department and I would see posters of Hans King and what I later come to find out of the sort of usual suspects of Protestant liberal theology and so I was a thoroughly disillusioned by the theology department there and the school itself put on a fairly good show of Dutch Calvinism and so we were made to read some of like the works of kuiper and some of these other people that were influential in the Dutch Calvinists strain but as far as if you actually wanted to study theology there was very as far as I could perceive there was little in the form of Calvinism to be found there and so I thought at the time also I discovered the philosophy departments excellent they've got a heritage of excellent philosophers that have come through here so well theology in philosophy I just dropped the theology and so I studied philosophy and it actually came to find out that I philosophy quite a bit and but - but so the group used to be at that school yeah that's right and actually it's funny because after I've graduated from Calvin there's a number of Calvin former Calvin grads who have converted to Catholicism so in fact I've heard that it's very good at getting people away from the the tradition that it's founded in but they were very firm in their Calvinist commitments in fact I remember there was a not-so-subtle emphasis by the president to get people out who were not committed to the tradition of Calvinism and so it's not as though they were I think at least at some level they they really wanted to be firmly committed to that tradition but in school I began to take seriously the Calvinist notion that I had been convinced of which was that justification was extrinsically imputed that it I was not justified because of anything what you might say intrinsic to me I was sort of covered over with the mantle of Jesus and so there was nothing when God looked at me he didn't see my own merits or demerits but rather the merits of Jesus and so a person in this life isn't changed that's right if you are of the chosen by God you are given the gift of that covering of the righteousness of Christ right you had nothing to do with it whatsoever even to that your dying day as little as Luther claimed he could commit adultery ten thousand that's right day and not lose it yeah because it was just this covering of your point of Jesus you point to Jesus that's nothing to do with me right send boldly and believe all the more boldly I think so I send boldly and and you know at the time previously in high school I had not been when I came no now is this is in both before and after I was not living a life of sanctity according to the traditions of the church but in high school I remember I was sort of I went through two phases one in high school and one in college the first phase was what you might call like a scrupulous 'ti of ambiguity so there's not very firm teachings about what's right and what's wrong but you sort of get these well dancing seems wrong right alcohol seems wrong caffeine maybe or smoking or these sorts of things but you know there's no mention of these in the Bible that are you know strong prohibitions and so I thought to myself well if these things are apparently wrong then I'll stop doing them and so I sort of went through this period of I got rid of all my non-christian music right and this is I remember being at a youth retreat and I remember one of the guys there was saying about how someone in his high school had said I want to be like you and I remember that guy he was very much like that you know and I didn't perceive him doing a lot of these sort of ambiguously bad things and so I tried to imitate that got rid of all my unchristian music and just listen to Christian music and I wouldn't smoke or anything I think not as though I did that before but I had a more firm commitment and so in college I began to take more seriously that fact that look my merits or my actions in so far as that goes don't give me any closer to God because I'm as close as I can possibly be because God looks at me and he just sees Jesus and so incrementally I began to sin with increasing boldness and you know I had friends there that were older and I would hang out with them and I drink underage and but then they were older so occasionally they'd go to bars I can go to him go with them to a bar and so then I'd go with my dorm buddies and we'd go to parties and the partying got more and more progressed and so the the sort of low point was I was arrested for drunk driving as a sophomore and that really shook me up I during the time you know even though I had an intellectual bent prior to going to college I had not really taken my studies seriously and I think sometimes it's a handicap if you're a little smarter in high school because most of the time you can get by without doing a lot of work and so you you form these habits of being very lazy and only reading what's interesting and only doing the work that's interesting and so when I got to college I if you don't if you don't read what's not interesting to you you're not going to do so well so especially during this first couple years I was not a strong student and after that point I began to take things a lot more seriously and is not too long after that I was going through you know like there's a lot of things that you have to do court dates and things like this which really shook me up and so it was not long after that that I met my wife now she lived in the area and stuff like that so meeting her and getting to know her provided me a lot more stability to get through that period of my life and so when it the time came to graduate I really didn't have a firm decision about what I wanted to do but I thought look I'm good at philosophy I like philosophy a lot I'll apply to grad schools and I started at Purdue in 2005 and studying a PhD student in philosophy and we were married in the Catholic Church my wife is a ok when we pause there cuz it's about time for Pelican I wanted to get back to what you were saying though is would you say that your movement into being more open even more bold into some sinful aspects of your life really had the philosophical theological backing to do you think or at least it was there well when you're sinning you don't want to think too much about God and so but after your sin is over right the passions are sort of subsided you can rationalize the behavior right so no resolutions to change will will be taken seriously why I mean why do I need to change I I look exactly the same from God's perspective before and after so there is a strong tendency to rationalize and not to resolve to change those things at least not resolved in a very serious way that would actually affect your behavior and I think the issues of don't dance don't play cards that are in some of those environments are not not scriptural yeah but it's almost a bit of a group thing yeah the people that you respect don't like those things right so they must not be good right and boy if they see me doing them they're gonna think I'm not a good Christian so maybe I better not do them either yeah that's right I mean there's the morality and then you come around with a lot of that those issues right let's take a break there Brian sure come back a little bit we'll pick up because you've met your wife and that's gonna have a big change in your life at this point okay let's talk about that I come back at more you welcome back to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host and our guest tonight is Brian B song we've interrupted your journey you've just met your wife it's G an active Catholic no she was not she was a cradle Catholic but the knowledge that she had of the faith was not very strong her dad he didn't want me to say this but he called himself a seein ear and what that is Christmas and Easter only and so the the faith that she was formed and was not very strong but she knew that she wanted to get married in the Catholic Church so I didn't see any problem with that it didn't really matter to me and so we got married in the Catholic Church and there's some that got married that summer and then I swear required to make the usual commitments yeah that's right yeah Chris you know being the sort of dissolute person the neg I was I you know I was I was changing but you yourself seriously kind of fallen back from a commitment to your faith not at the time no in fact you know one of the things that I think one of the misperceptions of me at that time was no faith right no personal relationship with Jesus but I thought about God just like thought about God after I sent right and and and I didn't use that thinking about God to change my actual behavior but again I had no reason to I knew this the faith right I thought faith and and so I knew that I worry about whether you were one of the elect or not I did sometimes you know it and one of the reasons why is internally my conscience strongly reproved my actions and so I was filled with guilt right but aren't I supposed to be filled with guilt right doesn't the loss isn't the loss opposed to leaving it Jesus I said the the grace imputation of Jesus and so so yes I did think about God and I did continue to have what I would describe then and now as a personal relationship insofar as anyone has a personal relationship in those conditions but yeah so we we got married in the Catholic Church and I started at Purdue soon afterwards and during that time at the beginning of our marriage I think I attended Mass with my wife once or twice and then she attended the reformed Presbyterian and so as I sort of progressed through college I became more and more Calvinist and so I I never joined as a member but I when I attended church I attended an associate reformed Presbyterian and then as I started at Purdue I found my intellectual affinities with the reformed Presbyterians to be the strongest but I went to church and so we went you know go here a little and go there a little and then we just didn't go anywhere I really wasn't a part of even your marriage at that point that's right I mean I say now to people that I don't have any memories of praying as a couple we might have said a blessing for our meal maybe I don't remember that my wife seems to remember that so it might just be that I slipped it slipped my mind but no it certainly wasn't part of our relationship and so for that period of time if a year and a half two years the our faith was basically a sort of stagnant thing for me it was an intellectual exercise you asked me questions about my faith I will affirm with even with vigor that the truths but but it wasn't as though it affected any of our actions or my actions and so it's sort of war on me and us though you know I thought in the back of my mind I want our kids to be raised in church and and so it bothered me that we didn't go anywhere I wanted to sort of settle these matters before we had kids and find something to go to so I think my wife I I would always when I'd say this I'd say that but I certainly not going to be a Catholic because there's all sorts of problems with that and and so the one of the things that she wanted to do is find out more about her faith so she could maybe at least know what it is that she believes and potentially even answer some of my objections and so we bought the book Catholicism for dummies and and Italy all right yeah yeah that's right and so I like to read and she doesn't like to read so I read the book first and I'm reading through this book and I I see this section on mortal versus venial sin that's new mortal sin you can go to hell for doing these things that go into confession well a serious missing mass on Sundays without a serious reason hey we do that using contraception we do that too and so you know one of the first things out of my mouth was hey do you know anything about mortal sin Amy and she vaguely sounds familiar I think they might have mentioned something like that and in church or catechism class long ago but I don't know anything about it and so I read the description you know big eyes oh and so so I I decided to start going to Mass with Amy just as a I didn't want her to get any sort of spiritual trouble we weren't going anywhere and actually was there's sort of an interesting convergence because during that time she was sort of experiencing some female health problems like pains and irregularity and things like this and so in the book it was either in the book or I looked online there was some mention of something called natural family planning and so I was like well maybe some of these things are going on because of birth control and and so let's look into this natural family planning stuff too more as a health thing than as a you know because I was convinced that it was wrong to do or something like that so that's sort of where we were and I started to go to Mass with her and and we started to look into natural family planning and there was a sort of during this time I was sort of intellectually interested I didn't know that much about the Kamath I never took it seriously and I often say that the the best comparison for my concept at the Catholic Church was like lederhosen and what I mean by that is I thought of it is a sort of ancient relic of Europe it's not a faith it's a sort of by gaun exercise of European culture and and it was not a faith because most of the Catholics that I knew had no strong faith life and the only Catholics that I knew my or the only religious people that I knew for instance in my dad's family or at least that I knew of were the people who had left the Catholic faith and became Protestants and they seemed very strong Christians and at least as far as I knew at that time those that were Catholic we're not very strong and so I didn't think of it as a serious faith and but you know reading Catholicism for dummies it seemed like well there's a lot there's a lot more to it than I originally estimated I'm kind of curious and so I think one of the things that really influenced me during that time was going to Mass with Amy there was a sort of gravity to the mass that was very it pulled me even though at the time I would have not really admitted that but there's a sort of seriousness to it even though it wasn't it didn't seem like a pretense and the reason I say that it's because at Calvin I remember attending these high liturgically styled Protestant churches with my older philosophy friends and I only sought them favorite joke I mean it seemed to me like a big show and a silly one at that and but the you know going to Mass it seemed very different and and I was sort of I felt sort of pulled and in a way that I wouldn't have been able to describe then and also not now which made me take more seriously the objections that I had to the Catholic faith because there's this poll this draw but at the same time I mean their notions of Mary are crazy right that's what I thought at least and so I had this book that was the book's title was early Christian doctrines by J&D Kelly and it's frequently used it's actually textbook I think and a lot of Protestant seminaries but I'd had this book and I never actually read it and so I said to to aim you know maybe some of these objections we may have some more insight into why the Catholic Church thinks what it does if I read about some of this early church stuff and so I decided to do that it wasn't long it's one of the first few chapters in it that talks about scripture and tradition and it wasn't long before I get completely disabused of the notion that the early church were believed in Sola scriptura or the notion that doctrines derived from the Bible alone and so I I saw in the conflicts with the Gnostics and other early heretics that they didn't so much appeal to the Bible as they did to the bishops and to the authority of the bishops and the success actually that as Newman discovered for himself that was the heretics yeah they would mess that were the Bible only folk they were going to the scripture to a scripture to a collection of scriptures alone it was the church that was appealing to the Magisterium the bishops that's right so I was pretty shocked I mean and and the reason I said well as a Protestant no one ever explicitly told this to me but you sort of get this notion of the early church as being Protestant right and over time these changes incremental II added up until the the kernel of the Protestant faith was sort of hidden over by this this sort of Roman tradition and so I'm reading about the early church I find nothing about that and I find a lot about the early church not just you know late 500 600 AD but early church and and the earliest I could find was the Catholic faith and that shocked me and so I I like philosophy and one of the things that I think makes me like philosophy is I like the attitude philosophers have towards truth I think more so in other disciplines if a philosopher is convinced of something he will defend it and he'll pursue it and come what may no one can agree with him but he'll continue to look into it and pursue it and so that's essentially what I did I converted to Catholicism very quickly after that and so yeah I began RCIA and I began to work through and and read a lot more in addition to the the early Christian doctrines that I had started with and you know histories of the church and things like that but one of the things that happened right before that is I thought oh my goodness okay this is very convincing right the early church is a Catholic Church but there's got to be something wrong with it right they wouldn't have all left if if it was all right and so I pull out my John Calvin on CD and I pull up the Institute's and I and just looking furiously for the objections that he had you know the powerful arguments that he must have had I mean he was a intellectual genius I thought certainly he had good arguments for rejecting the Catholic faith and I couldn't find one and so I I also go in these these apologetics websites and the two that I remember there was one karma org and then there was another one Alpha and Omega and ministries and that one in the second one was a more anti Catholic than the first one but I started looking at their objections to the Catholic faith and say okay well there's got to be something to what they have to say and and so I'm looking through these and I'm on the fence and I can't find a single argument that's persuasive to me every single one I I mean this this voice in my head would suggest the response and I'd find the response more persuasive than the argument that they presented so I I don't have any reason not to be Catholic and these arguments here are very persuasive about the early church and so then I sort of look at the Bible again with new eyes and all these Catholic verses are jumping out at me how did I miss that the church the pillar and foundation of the faith not the Bible so that that's the the basic that's how I will convince you had spoken a lot on about the the Calvinist views tulip and all that how do you deal with that specifically with the Catholic view of the will the Catholic view of good works faith and righteousness and justification did you deal with that theologically once I saw that the early church didn't believe those things it didn't take much for me to be persuaded that my earlier views were wrong and so looking again at the arguments scriptural arguments for those things they fell apart and it didn't take I know there are other converts who really had to struggle with these issues and work through them and and fine detail for me it was not like that you know I I read about the early church and I look back at the Bible and the the arguments for these these doctrines and aside I don't know why I was convinced them in the for convinced of them at the beginning and so you know one of the problems that I remember seeing was some of those things in my own journey was realizing that even Calvin's huge Institute's is based on presumptions yeah little by little assumptions so he has this great argument by the time it gets into the reasoning of things but as you go way back the assumptions it begins with are wrong there's a whole group of evangelical Christians that went Eastern Orthodox and they describe why they did that they said we're gonna go back to the beginning we're gonna we're gonna look at all the issues from scratch clean slate yeah of course we can't accept the authority of the Pope so he won't go there right so they begin another argument with a presupposition they won't even people availability they presume it's wrong well this was at the core of many of Calvinists arguments yeah I mean even his taking a spin on agustin and making a Gustin fit into his own philosophy right what about your own struggle with philosophy then and moving to the Catholic Church well the areas of philosophy that I worked in did not really they were sort of independent of these things and at that time I was doing most of my coursework anyway so was not it didn't really influence my conversion except maybe the attitude philosophy and philosophers have towards truth but after my conversion well I should explain something about what happened after my conversion it'll make more sense of my philosophy my so I converted I was confirmed in 2008 and I kept calling my parents right and I've tell them all about what it is that I've discovered you know these early church things that kind of with biblical arguments and I'd respond to the arguments and and this back and forth went on for I would guess maybe a year or so and I should say that immediately before my parents marriage my mom had been confirmed in the Catholic faith she had decided to become a Catholic but the priest told her when she said well I don't believe any of that stuff about Mary the priest had told her well we all have our issues with the Catholic faith and she was never encouraged to make a first confession or anything like that so her catechesis was nothing and but all that it would take for her to return is to make a first good confession and so I was encouraging them and my dad to make a good confession and so this back and forth went on for about a year and my sister was very antagonistic towards the Catholic faith in fact I remember one time we were there for Christmas and she was on the phone with my mom and she said did you go to Mass or did you go to real church and and I don't have to responded but at any rate I I started this dialogue on the side with my sister via email again showing her the same sorts of arguments that I was presenting to my parents and at a certain point this sort of converged I was talking to my mom one day about the Catholic faith and she immediately broke down crying and I was very out of character for her and I said what's wrong and she said I just remembered a dream that I had last night I said a dream that's weird and she said my dad's mom and her were at a mass and they were watching it was very stirring they were watching the mass and then after the mass they left and she said that she saw the priest who is celebrating Mass and he was glowing and beautiful and and she just was she she couldn't speak to me anymore on the phone she just you know started crying and Ernest and I had to get off the phone and I was like I think it was a Friday and that whole weekend I'm thinking to myself you know stuff like that doesn't just happen that's a saint that's in her dream and what's going to happen is she gonna be somewhere doing something she's gonna see a picture and she's gonna say that's the the glowing and beautiful priest from my dream and and so on Sunday I'm talking to my parents again and I tell my dad that and I say I bet that was a saint that appeared to her and he said well you have any ideas what kind of hoo-hoo might have been and I said well I don't know definitely but there's this this priest Cardinal Newman who was a famous convert from Protestantism to Catholicism he would be a good fit for what's going on here and so he talked I talked to my mom for a little bit and then we got off the phone and about 10 minutes later I get this frantic phone call from my mom and she says Ryan this really goose-bumpy thing happened to me and I said what she said she just repeated the same thing and I said well what happened she said have you ever heard of a person named Cardinal Newman and I said yeah and she said that was the one that was the the priest from my dream and and I said Wow mom do you know what that the significance of that and I had to explain to her she'd never heard of Cardinal Newman or anything about him and and so I explained the significance of her of that to her and she was taken aback well that that's not the end of it as I mentioned I had been talking to my sister during that time about the Catholic faith and it took a few days for my mom to feel confident enough to tell my sister about what happened her but a few days passed and she was talking to my sister on the phone and she described the dream and what had happened and my sister responded mom that trip that dream was for me I had prayed that very night God show me if Catholicism or Protestantism is true but I don't want an angel appearing to me that would freak me out send a dream and she'd prayed that the same night that my mom had gotten this dream with Cardinal Newman showing up so it didn't take much for my mom my my sister and my dad to to enter the Catholic Church my sister had to go through RCIA but my parents just had to make good confessions for the time outside the church so as far as my philosophy goes I began to take this cardinal lumen character seriously I didn't know who he was in a very particular way but I began to look more into what it was that he talked about so since then my doctoral work is really focused on making sense of the conscience in terms that in moral epistemology which is the area of philosophy concerned with how we know about moral facts trying to make sense of how the conscience fits into the picture that contemporary moral epistemologists paint and so my dissertation work is a defence of what I call the prudent conscience view which is this this view that I've developed that tries to make sense of Cardinal Newman's and Thomas Aquinas --is work on what conscience is and other most Protestant philosophers are not big on the Scholastic's or Thomas Aquinas and I wonder if you have seen that it's a barrier to many Protestant thinkers yeah is it being closed to the working of Thomas Aquinas and the other what they all opened right up to me the doctors of the church for for so long as a Protestant it was all on my own right I had to I I could trust Wayne Grudem maybe fantail I could trust but beyond that I really had to scrutinize everything that I read well there's these doctors of the church that I can read them and I can be persuaded of what they say is true and I can trust them and so I I began to read quite a bit Teresa of ávila John of the Cross Thomas Aquinas basically anything I can get my hands on that was in this Catholic tradition well in Teresa of ávila John across all those are really talking about it changed life yeah which would have been totally in Calvinism there wouldn't have been a need for growing in grace right right growing in obedience going through stages of spiritual development I mean that was so this was all new to use yeah and and at the same time that guilt that had been on my soul since college was just bearing on me and so to realize that that guilt was real guilt in the face of God that I needed to make a confession and get that guilt off my soul and then that there was this path of sanctity traced out by saints that are before me that entails actual and close union with God rather than a sentimentalist union with God or an ideological union that you know as explained as Union even though there's no real union of soul so yeah these these Saints really move me a Calvinist might be listening and think you've gone from one extreme where it's nothing that you can do it's only God so now it's all you mm-hmm and we've got to make sure we correct that assumption because they ain't the truth that's what Catholics believe oh yeah that's all on me well it's certainly not all on me because if it was I'd be in a world of hurt but it the the grace of Jesus which is infused into my soul makes me capable of doing these things and so and it makes my trying to do these things meritorious where before they wouldn't really have been meritorious in the eyes of God so it is the grace of Jesus but the notion of grace is the right one and it's because it's the right one that I don't have to rationalize my guilt away anymore it's almost like that the really difference between philosophy of teen Calvinism and the Catholic faith really is a philosophical issue that it seems that most Calvinists get stuck on the either-or yeah and so you have the Armenians in the Calvin's battling over the either or either or either this is either the free will of God free will of man of the sovereignty of God well both we're as Catholics we the mystery of that both and mm-hmm is the beauty of of growing and sanctity that's really is totally great we know that but we still have to give it our all that's right yeah so it I was very moved by seeing all these things and and the the truth is important not just because it's true but because in this case it leads to happiness and so it it really did change me not just intellectually but as a person more generally to be confronted with these truths and to act on them very glad that I did let's say that we have watching the program right now a person who is now where you were yeah Calvinist Presbyterian anything you'd like to say to them about why they should make the same journey home you've made well I mean if if they're moved by the early church then I would recommend reading the early church fathers that in my mind took away the barriers which were rational arguments I was able to see through the arguments based on looking at the way that early church really was not the way that I had been sort of made to think it was but you know it's funny because I know that there are a lot of people who read the early fathers in fact soon after I was converted I started to talk to other graduate students like you got a you got to read these chapters with me so I remember reading what I remember having lunch with a very strong Protestant and I had him read J&D Kelly's chapter on Scripture and tradition and he tried to gloss over the whole thing you know I I one of the the fathers thinks the bishops in unison are infallible and complete gloss well they're infallible when they read the Bible or you know like that you know this this very glib perspective on what it is they say not taking it seriously and you know one of the things I asked him afterwards is you know you think that you would so you work with me as a graduate student are you telling me that someone 2,000 years later could read my dissertation and understand it better than you who's talking to me about it and he said yes I think that and and he didn't really have much to say in response and that was the last lunch we had agreed to he'll have I'll give him something to read and then he'll give me something to read and he said I'm too busy to to meet with you again so so for those people out there I recommend reading the early fathers but also taking them seriously as as having heard you know the voice of Jesus and and the people around him all right price well thank you for joining us on the journey home really appreciate it and and God's blessing on your continued work in your PhD studies thank you for your witness you and Amy god bless you and thank you for joining us on this edition of the journey home I hope Brian's story is encouragement to you to consider the beauty and fullness of the church god bless you see you next week

Channel: EWTN

Views: 14,015

Rating: 4.6330276 out of 5

Keywords: Brian Besong, JHT01373

Id: K0vg19dWJmM

Length: 56min 28sec (3388 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2012