Journey Home - 2013-10-14 - Jeff Barefoot - Former Protestant - Catholic Convert

good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program every week EWTN gives me this privilege to join with you to hear the stories of men and women who drawn by the Holy Spirit to open their heart and mind to the beauty of our Lord Jesus in his church and such as the case with our guest tonight Jeff barefoot this is a great privilege whenever I do the program it just never know and this is going to be a fun one tonight because Jeff and I go way back in a way that we didn't suspect and so we'll share with that in a moment as a former Unitarian and even joggle and Jeff welcome to the jury Thank You Marcus it is a deep pleasure and a very humbling to be here and also I want to thank you for having me on the show it's just wonderful to be with you well it's good we it's good to have you here and it's fun because we did cross paths many years ago quite young men I think I weighed half when I ran out back in those days but you know God's been good to both of us ever since in ways that we if we could put ourselves back to when we met can't how many years ago was that 40 years ago or so I think at the time neither of us would have had the least inkling that we'd be where we are today absolutely farthest thing from my mind that I would become a Catholic yes or you and that we would be sitting here together on this show so God has a wonderful sense of humor doesn't me and in you know in a way that that also connects with something else that often happens on the journey home program is is that you're being on the program may through this media connect you with people that you've not seen for many many years oh Jeff you know Ross's mind and that's to me that's one of the beauties of this program is it allows you an opportunity to share what God has done in your life to those that maybe you'd never want to share yeah and that's why I love this program well Naidu - and it was so in instrumental in my conversion and I real do hope that the listeners and the viewers tonight will would be blessed by the things that you and I talked about now how good God is to us to lead us to this church all right well I'll get out of the way and allow you to go back as far as you can to start the journey off let the people know where you came from spiritually well sure Marcus I am I'll skip over the first early part of my life because it's it's not all that instrumental but I was born and raised in Toledo Ohio I was a child of the 50s and 60s faith and religion were an important part of my very early life I think Christianity was a almost more of a cultural involvement for many I was baptized in a Congregational Church when I was a year old by my good parents my parents raised my sister and I went to Sunday School quite regularly and and had a kind of a normal cultural Christian experience the first maybe 10 years of my life anybody that lived through the 60s knows what began to happen yeah through that I was gonna say Congregationalism see some of our Catholic audience may not be familiar with congregation well Congregationalism is is the governmental structure is is independently run by each congregation and really on a democratic vote so for 'ti is rested in the body of the members but it wasn't too much longer into my 10 11 12 13 years old that my family no longer went to church my parents certainly believed in God and raised my sister and I with beautiful morals and strong morals and taught us deeply right and wrong but like so many of the families in that period of time cultural Christianity began to wane what we would call today mainline Protestantism no kind of began to wane and to my parents credit I would say they took a position with my sister and I that we could be open to religion we could find what faith would fit us or we could have no faith they were not going to push us one way or the other and well no you you strike on something because you know many of us have been hearing have heard that this kind of philosophy amongst parents of the 50s and 60s was rising in other words I'm gonna let my children decide for them so yes yes so you were of that I was right and you know I had a very large extended family and on my mother's side we were extremely close all of us and we had a real mix of of faith we had people that in our family that didn't believe didn't go to church at all we had a couple members of our family attended the same church my family did we had one Unitarian so that the family was very open there was a lot of conversation and I know that the comment for many is that maybe that wasn't the best thing but in my case and I think in my sister's case what it allowed for me early on was to be in to begin to develop a very curious and aggressive way of trying to find truth first Timothy chapter 2 says that God desires that all come to salvation and the knowledge of truth and I think often times we think of those things that one thing I was something to separate that trying to find God and trying to find the truth were were two separate journeys by the time I got through junior high school I could I could not find the answers or the sense of Christianity it it did not make sense to me I don't think I was exposed well to what we would today call apologetics you know substitutionary death of Christ on the cross it didn't make sense to me the Trinity I understood Father Son and Holy Spirit it didn't make sense the older I got the more I would question or things like miracles even the very nature of heaven and hell were not clear to me at the same time I knew there was a God and I knew I wanted to know him but it Christianity just did not become clear to me the idea of the second coming was symbolic to me these are that I was grasping to learn and I have to say in the neighborhood I grew up in not junior high the high school there was very little discussion about these kinds of things again this is the mid 60s yeah we get into high school and we're exposed to the transcendentalist thinkers through our literature class and boy that took off for me Henry David Thoreau in Walden Pond and the self-made man the idea that we could you know live a good noble life and sort of in the context of a deist god I had a great respect for Thomas Jefferson and I thought boy that the idea that God made the world certainly couldn't be denied by me not by looking at his creation but somehow I didn't know anybody that a holy God intervened in their life I didn't see God intervening in my life I didn't deny his existence but to think that he would reach down and have some kind of a personal relationship with me became more and more distant now I want to make something really clear to this journey to the Catholic Church for me was not just a great intellectual search it was also about the heart about struggling with sin our sin nature who we are how we fail how we fail ourselves how we fail one another in our relationships so all this time in my young life when I'm thinking about philosophy and religion I'm also very aware that I'm not the most perfect person that ever walked the face of the earth in fact there probably been quite a few more holy and more people important people on this show than me but I was I was a very sensitive to the issue of my own failing often didn't stop me from failing more but I was aware of this so deism and Unitarianism was very attractive to me because number one it would give me more control over my life if if there's not a God that intervenes then there's not a God I'm accountable to is there and I could have the freedom to run that future of mine out as far as I wanted to run it and in a way I think it morally let me off my own hook if there wasn't a god that I was accountable to I was able to live and do the things I wanted to do so Unitarianism was very important to me we had a wonderful Unitarian Church in Toledo where I grew up had it by one of the most famous nationally known Unitarian ministers so I became a Unitarian had a great high school upbringing where you and I met through student government I was a fairly popular young man I was always getting elected student leadership roles had a good family my father and grandfather were prominent lawyers in town from the outside you know my life was was pretty attractive for a young guy but I was hollow inside I was empty and my study of philosophy which started mid high school Aristotle Plato political philosophy anything I could read really wasn't digging down and getting me the answers of the heart was satisfying the head not the heart I was thinking in that parallel of the deist understanding I mean you're a young man gifts and you have a father parents that brought you into this world you know at some point to say you're on your own yeah and we can have that be our human understanding of God yes he brought us into this world yeah but at some point I gave you gifts I gave you opportunities what you make it it's up to you right it's Samuel there's the model the human model one other thing though where you went to school and everything in Toledo you know there's a pretty strong Catholic community there like a butyl beautiful cathedral yes active Catholic community was that any connection with you during all those years and not really till high school but we grew up in in a very lovely middle-class neighborhood there were Catholic playmates were very aware prior to John Kennedy's election in 1960 that we were different culturally Protestantism and Catholics were they intermingled but they were really different they socialized differently they did business together differently but you know the Catholics were always a try gifted me as a little boy their unity they weren't also a little scary - but didn't understand any of them and and there was not the same kind of communication that we have today high school later years the Catholics in the 60s to me were it was post Vatican - they were just as they were just as distant from their faith as most of the Protestants and evangelicals I had met but in the in them in the summer of 1971 I was working had an outdoor job and I had a young fellow on the crew that I worked with who had kind of a rough life and came to work one day and announced that he had been born again that he had met Jesus and thus emerging Jesus movement was a beginning yeah right rain event right then and I thought this was rather interesting I thought it was profound but I also thought he was kind of foolish and I thought it was going to be my project for the next six or seven weeks to debate him and really God used him in a beautiful way because what I found Marcus was that I would try and throw questions and probes at him and he would love me I began to see the change in his life and in his heart over that summer that was quite shocking to me here was a man a young man like me who was looking for meaning and purpose and said he found it he actually had the audacity to say I found the answer not something you say in the 60s but although that became a bumper sticker no long after I remember that yeah I found it valid but he really had and he began to give me answers through the whole area of apologetics that I had never heard before that seemed highly plausible and this combination of having truth spoken to me into my own emptiness of my own heart and seeing what happened to his life was so appealing that by the time I headed off to college that fall from the beginning of my sophomore year God had really set me up so I end up in the dormitory surrounded by seven eight fellows who were members of a parachurch group called InterVarsity Christian Fellowship so God had kind of planned that and they began to ask me to go to their evening meetings and I was absolutely blown away by the love and the beauty they had for one another but the answers that fall josh mcdowell evidence that demands a verdict great apologetics came to the campus and spent an entire week and I remember I went to his first lecture and I was so driven by the truth of the claims of Christianity for the first time in my life I cut all my classes and spent the rest of the week hanging out with Josh McDowell you might remember in some of our listeners and viewers would remember there was a book back then in the 70s called late great planet Earth by Hal Lindsey out of the Dallas Theological School and that had a profound effect but more than anything was the writings of dr. Francis Schaeffer of the LaBrie fellowship the combination of finding a pure apologetic for Christianity that Christ was the son of God was was thrilling and scary at the same time but I knew that after the experiment we unitarianism for two and a half years I knew that my heart was lonely and desirous of being touched that that the success I was having as a young man was not fulfilling me and that I could not find that truth that I longed for what to the thing that probably thinks scared me that most as I would spend 75 years living and be on my deathbed and find out that I got it wrong that I had lived a life apart and devoid from truth so in that fall of 1971 after a great deal of prayer and understanding of my own sin nature how far I had been from God how I had rejected his advances I had what what I considered that born-again experience we as Catholics know we find God when we're baptized which is what my gift my parents gave me but it was a profound conversion for me I was I was deeply moved by it my activities began to reflect that I began to do Bible studies in my fraternity at Miami University and that that year the Campus Crusade for Christ ministry at Miami University in Ohio and InterVarsity grew tenfold in a period of nine months Christianity swept the campus it was it was absolutely astounding so my early Christianity was in you know tied up in Para church I got married immediately out of college I was married for 24 years and sadly that marriage ended but throughout my adult life I got out of school I went to law school at night worked for a judge during the day after law school I got my CPA had three wonderful children I'm all close to today and started my business I'm in the family office wealth management business so in my 30s not a lot of time to read and study I'm going to pause there though because I don't want to before I move on into the the rest of the journey I don't want to lose your reflection on that born-again touch yeah that indeed was no mere emotional fiction that was a real changing it was real and I've never met an evangelical that or Catholic that has had that experience that Christ does come to us in these deeply personal ways and he comes over and over again later to find out it's not a one-time experience in fact our conversions ongoing it was it was a it was a beautiful touching and satisfied the heart and I think you know I'm reminded of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that every insight every man's heart is that God shaped vacuum then only God can fill or coerce Agustin you you made us for yourself O Lord and our hearts are restless until they finally find their rest in thee Jesus is if if he's true then he's not a theory right he's he's not a religious belief system he is in fact the God of the universe so um but I remember having myself that same experience the reality of God changing my life and at the same time and what I remember was thinking that of that as the time I was converted to Jesus mm-hmm I remember going back to my Lutheran pastor and almost angry why didn't you tell me this why didn't you tell me you know and but it took me a while before I recognized now wait a second no no I had been told I just hadn't heard him yes but it also took me a while to realize that that that awakening was in certain sense a reawakening of what had happened to me in Baptism years before I mean did it take you a while to preach all that very thought it took me till I became a Lutheran years later to really begin to understand that again sacraments made sacraments I thought weren't things that were sacred I didn't have any concept at all the sacrament actually does something X operator feretto that it actually moves you by a grace outside of you from God so by the time my three children were a little bit older and I had established myself in business I I had a little more time to dig into them some of the theological issues but like a lot of Protestant families in the eighties you you change churches for strange reasons usually not theological kids have a good youth group or I like I like the pastor mostly because evangelical Protestantism centers around the sermon or maybe there's a church split and you leave but as as we we made the move to a grace Brethren Church very early in the 80s there was a young CPA who had dropped out of a County and became a pastor and it was a lot of young people and it was here where I first really began to get the time to study the Scriptures deeply and I got in a Bible study that I started with a few other fellas and that Bible study went on for over 22 years every Tuesday morning I began to see scriptural interpretations began to bother me I'm I'm a lawyer by training I got my best marks and logic and evidence looking at things and trying to make them fit was very important in this claim that everybody wanted to get back to the early church of Acts they wanted to be the original pure Church the idea that that there was such a pure Church and I began to notice these different Bible interpretations over important issues like baptism drinking should you drink alcohol or not baptism as a youth baptism at the point of conversion second coming virtually everywhere I looked there was different interpretations and by this time I had some Catholic friends that through a couple things at me some Catholic verses from the Bible that would begin to bother me they would I would begin to read them and say you know the Catholics in John chapter 6 talking about our Lord's Holy Eucharist have a more literal interpretation in the Protestants do and that disturbed me how could how could we find our claim as evangelical Protestants that we live by the Bible when clearly we got to something like John chapter 6 and we interpreted it spiritually so after the grace Brethren Church which was basically Anabaptist and radically different from Methodism we we joined a Methodist Church and it was beautiful it was the fellowship there was absolutely remarkable to this day I I don't think I've ever felt anything as warm and as as honest and true as the fellowship at that church and thank God so much for what he did for me as a 30 years in the Protestant church but when I got into Methodism I picked up everything I could find that Wesley had written and devoured it and saw that experiment experiential nature that Wesley talked about that you and then we sent our kids to Lutheran's great school down the road from the church we were going to Missouri Synod Lutheran and when my daughter was in eighth grade and needed to be confirmed as a Methodist she came and said I want to be confirmed as a Lutheran and barring a page from my parents I said well if you could tell me why I'll go along with it and she really was the one that first introduced me to the real presidents in eighth grade I found this shocking you know and I thought well I'm going to read up on this and so I began to read everything I could about Luther and I was utterly amazed as we studied Luther I found out this doesn't look like American evangelical Christianity at all Luther believed that Christ was truly present in the communion he believed Mary was a perpetual virgin he believes grace came through baptism outside of you these were shocking to me you know that that this could be so far and so close to Catholicism how did our American Reformation religious movement get from Luther to where we were at that time and long story short we became Lutheran's all of us and I began then a series of a couple of years of digging into everything I could read about Luther so this is my pattern I would read Calvin I would read Wesley I would read Luther and come to the Bible study and find that all of us were dancing all over these doctrines in different areas it was the Bible study of men of all these different groups yeah they were all different groups and when they would change churches they would change churches too some were Methodists some were Presbyterian some had become grace brother and I became Lutheran and we would throw these doctrines out and gnaw on them together and and and I I remember thinking where does this come from this idea that Christians can read scripture and interpret it for themselves really is found in a verse where I think Marcus think it's in John but it's the Lord promising to the disciples that he will send them the Holy Spirit to be able to interpret all things and I read after 1415 and he talks about the the para cleaved the Paraclete guiding us yeah the pair of cleats going to come and everything I had been taught was that I could read the scriptures and that Paraclete would come to Jeff barefoot and I could make up my own theology but you know here I was a fairly intelligent guy spending a good part of a decade trying to find that early church and I I couldn't come up with it I couldn't come up with it from the Scriptures certainly and if I had to go outside the scriptures to Christian history then it really wasn't the Bible alone wasn't that was leading me into truth I realized we've got a problem here that that interpretation of the Holy Spirit is the key to giving you interpretation was never meant for the individual Christian it was indeed meant for the Apostles and the disciples fact I was even thinking at that time that you're having this Bible study with this men all different basic mainline Protestant groups I mean you're talking about the Holy Spirit's the key here did you ever make Pentecostals in that group well um I actually had us a mild charismatic Pentecostal openness and had some experience with that briefly but my point is that would throw an even another it would angle in while Lutheran Methodist Unitarian grace Brethren Presbyterian gathering it's real Pentecostal in that group and all of a sudden now you're really you're really against at odds on how you understand how the Holy Spirit leads you right to understand that's great exactly when and one of the things I want to make absolutely clear to anybody that's evangelical or Protestant listening is it has nothing to do with the love of Christ my brothers had my brothers and sisters and their passion see that they want what we want they want to get closer to Jesus they want to know him in a more deeper in a way so it's not a matter of the heart or the motive it's it's the matter of stepping back and saying wait a minute now let's let's go re-examine our presuppositions here I remember saying to my five friends I want to ask you a question let's take five doctrines of Christianity and we have five men we're all going to go into five separate rooms with a yellow pad and we're going to be in that room for five days and we're going to spend one day each one of us in isolation on dark on each one of those five doctrines we're going to reconvene and at the end of five days what do you think the chances are that we're all going to agree on those five doctrines but that's exactly what happened with the early church they were able to agree and if we could not agree then the next logical question was well then who's right who has the Holy Spirit interpreting for them and who does not do I or does my other brother have that interpretation it became impossible that then raises the obvious question is this what God intended when we go and look at John chapter 17 Jesus is high priestly prayer he's going to the cross the next day and he's telling us we need to be unified and that the world will judge us on that unity they have the right to judge us on our love and unity this began to really eat at me because the only place I could see unity was in the or that Eastern Orthodox Church but most importantly in the Roman Catholic Church why don't we pause very good thank you pause were with Jeff barefoot in this episode of the journey home so let's pause there and a moment Jeff and then when we come back after the break we'll pick up right where all of a sudden where does this identification of lack of logic welcome back to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host and I'm enjoying our time tonight with with an old friend you know that we haven't seen each other forever Jeff barefoot and I was gonna say forming at Aryan evangelical but you you you dipped your toe and a lot of yeah of Christian traditions seeking the truth seeking to find that church and really I mean again it wasn't just an intellectual journey by this time I'm a Christian for over two decades and I'm very aware that I'm a sinner still that my conversion to Christianity did not clean my life up perfectly and that I'm still trying to find redemption in the deepest corners of my soul I'm still trying to find a deeper more intimate relationship with this God that loves me yeah we know all throughout scriptures plenty of scriptures wet but you guarantee that our Lord responds yes to a prayer yes persons seeking seeking God yeah even if that person is coming from Street some strange part of the world but they've never had a Christian witness but if and as they're touching that that void in the heart you talking about from Pasco and they're reaching out God responds yes the beauty of that and you see that in your own life you do and I think you you're you're speaking really what Hebrews says is that that if you're going to find God you must first believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him and so you know I to see that I needed I I needed something more than then scripture to take me into that intimacy I desired and at the same time because of my legal training the way I thought I I was becoming more and more disturbed with the lack of unity and a 20-year journey that for me could not find the church could not find it and around this time I think it was a john paul ii had published a book called crossing the threshold of hope yeah I read it I think was a gift from my sister for a Christmas present and I was so moved to think that the Catholic faith could produce a person like this and mother Teresa was I could no longer deny the fruit of the Holy Spirit was producing beautiful people in the Catholic faith I could be on open terms with the Catholic Church through a whole series of events I began to get exposed to Catholic theology I was wandering up up until this point you probably know no idea really what can and didn't want it there was nobody in the five or six guys together that table nobody was sharing would like to believe on these issues in Catholic would have I might as well go into the moon there's nobody in my background I had a nephew that converted and I have a cousin that I'm now extremely close to that converted but she was in across the country California we had virtually no really no exposure at all and for me to go down the road to Catholicism would mean I I would and my family what would we be doing we'd be leaving you know the community that we were hurt and you know that that's what your whole ministry is about but nonetheless as we got into the Lutheran Church I began to see what Luther was talking about about the sacraments on the way to Cleveland one day somebody had given me some Scott Hahn tapes and I listened to his tapes especially on the Eucharist and I can remember vividly being so moved that I had to pull the car over on the side of the Ohio Turnpike that that I had never really looked at this issue that Christ would be present as he said in John chapter 6 body blood soul and divinity and that he would come to me a sinner from outside me to lift me up and give me that very intimacy I was thinking of so I kind of played a trick I adopted the Catholic view but consistently stayed in the Lutheran view of there you know the Missouri Synod Lutheran view of that but not long after that if you're going to sit and be consistently logic you're going to you're going to start asking yourself some questions like why are the Catholic doing Eucharistic daily and we're doing it every other week well the answer I got to that was we don't we don't want to take it for granted oh so be like my wife Maria and I only go see her every other weekend because I don't want to take her advantage of as if this is truly body blood soul and divinity of Christ why is this not something daily then it raises a question for you how does the body and blood become the body and blood and through what authority the Catholics maintained that they have a priesthood that only through that priesthood only through proper Holy Orders can that bread and wine become what it claims Jesus claimed that was it starts raising all kinds of uh shoes well our can I go do this at home because my Lutheran minister properly ordained you start digging into issues of authority and you begin to open up some very powerful issues that are going to point you away from Protestantism finally you could boil down Protestantism the way I had understood it through all those years of looking you could boil it down to two basic theologies the first is the internal calling the Pentecostal the the Quaker that I hear an inner voice of God in me and I'm acting on that inner voice based on my subjective calling I feel it it's warm it's true it has some basis in Scripture but that calling is basically an internal motivated calling the second foundation is the right of self interpretation of Scripture many many guests here and on your radio show speak of Sola scriptura but actually it's even deeper than that it's my right and my five Bible studies but he's right and any church I attended the right to interpret scripture the way I want to interpret it if if those are the two simple foundations I began to see I I couldn't stay there because what it implies is God is a God of chaos I mean I couldn't deny after all my denominational walking's and readings that there was not unity there was disunity and disharmony and often even some hostility could this be what God wanted could this be what Jesus was calling for in John chapter 17 but before he went to the cross could this be what Paul had written about about us avoiding schism so if in fact biblical self interpretation was a doctrine of God then God intended it and he was a God of chaos well that's a conclusion you certainly couldn't come to and if interpret and if the self interpretation was truthful then there really can't any be any objective truth and one of the things that Protestants and Catholics have been fighting since the 70s is subjectivism but if you really take down this idea that I can have this Quaker warming I can have this Pentecostal knowing I can have this charismatic knowing and base my theology all of it on that movement of the Spirit inside of me then ultimately the roots of our subjectivism would be our faith it's exactly the opposite of what Christianity always taught and it was exactly the opposite of one of the greatest threats of our century so I got on speaking terms with the Catholic Church and by now you know my kids were heading out of Lutheran school they were going to go to Catholic great high school there were no Lutheran high schools and they were going to go to Catholic High School so I decided I'm going to study up and get ready for their Catholic education and your show was just beginning I began to watch it I began to find out there were men like Scott Hahn and so many others that had come into the Catholic Church and this shocked me I didn't know there was two-way traffic in fact when I was young I I led several of my friends out of the Catholic Church I'm going to great efforts try bring them back now but so you know I became open and that really began a very slow process over a couple of year period to begin to read and and really be open to Catholicism had I not been as a young Unitarian open to Christianity at some point I wouldn't have come to know him and as I said at the beginning had my parents not given me the freedom to look and examine I not have found my way I kind might my walk it's sort of a reverse walk through history you know from Cambridge Unitarian Cambridge to congregational and New England to Luther and Germany and finally to Rome I I laugh and say I walked to Rome backwards from Cambridge but Marcus also I have to I have to say to its these two ideas that we we want to search God with all our mind but he tells us to come and find him with all our heart too and I was in desperate need of reconversion there were just things that I had crud that I had accumulated in my life that I wasn't satisfied with the inner man wasn't wasn't at peace with the things that I was looking for and I knew that I love Jesus I knew my friends did and I knew that I wanted to find that truth I could see the more I would go into the Bible now with Catholic eyes take off my Protestant eyeglasses put on Catholic eyeglasses and give them a fair chance I was absolutely astounded you've talked about this the verses you've never read before you know John chapter 6 came came forth Matthew 16:18 where our Lord takes Peter out there on the rock and you know just these things really being you know I remember I've known many people and I think you probably seem that had this born-again experience of the 70s for all the good of it and we believe it's of the Lord yeah but the danger of it of course is that that powerful life-changing experience starts to fade yes and so I've known many that it seems that their whole Christian experience from then on was trying to relive that experience to bring it back to keep it going yes and you can get burnout because it's based on an experience and not on the authority of knowing that this is true exactly and we have an enemy we have an enemy that wants to tear at our faith and and at everything that we're about so I just devoured everything I could on Catholic apologetics I remember reading one book the spirit and form of Protestantism that I heard you mentioned on the show that was tremendous Karl Keating's book everything Scott Hahn read I wrote something read some of the things you had written David Carrie it just went on and on and the more I would watch your show and see how many people had made this journey the more gave me courage that I could approach it so it it it really was coming out of Lutheranism and coming to conclusion on a couple of things about Luther that were not fitting to me about the human experience Luther's idea that were a pile of dung covered with snow and that when Christ looks at us when God looks at us as the judge he sees the whiteness of Christ but underneath were not changed now that I knew wasn't true I knew I was a contradiction in my own life of good and evil I could see both parts within me the battle of sin never being completely conquered and the goodness I was striving for never being fully achieved and then when I understood what sacraments were and I began to see Christ set up these sacraments I began to see in Acts chapter 15 the consul's that were there that when the church had a dispute it went up to the consul the promises made to Peter in Matthew 16 that I'm gonna take this falling guy just like Jeff barefoot and I'm gonna turn him into the first pope and only by the power of God could he take an infallible or a fallible man and protect him from err so I I entered the church on east of Easter Vigil of 2002 it was the day after my 50th birthday and chose for my patron saint joseph of arimathea who had been a successful businessman deeply rooted in the jewish culture but knew when he was with the resurrected Lord he had to change and he had the courage to make that change so much so that he would actually hold the body of our Lord and and give the rest of his life you mentioned a few those verses that neither of us saw before yeah but one of them was that one then Luke one where our lady says all generations shall call me blessed what about our lady in your journey Marcus it's been the biggest surprise when I first became Catholic I was not resistant but it's so foreign you know what the Protestant experience was and over the years really again digging into evidence I went to Fatima my wife Maria and I met my wife Maria on Catholic match.com she's a cradle Catholic and a great traveler in the spiritual journey together Guadalupe and then spent about a year looking at Catholic theology from Marian eyes and realized the profundity of the truth that beginning in Genesis chapter 3 we get our first prophecy that the woman is going to come and crush the head of Satan all the way to revelations 12 the Queen of Heaven that we see and Jesus calling his mom his mother woman twice in Scripture first at his opening of the feast at Cana and secondly on his cross farid back to her as that woman in Genesis I realize I had a spiritual mother that loved me and I didn't need to resist that no she's not God she's human but if if George Washington invited me to Mount Vernon and his mother was going to be there when I treat her like she was just any other member of his second cousin family or would I give her great honor and I went through the st. Louis de Montfort consecration to to Mary and my wife did a couple of months later and our growing devotee the thing that's confused is Protestant is to love Jesus I have to reject Mary because she might compete with him to love Jesus I have to make Mary a sinner like me that Catholic is to love Jesus is to see the profound creation he made in his own mother he created her he's the third person of the Trinity and so she's she's become a way to get closer to Jesus not a competitor of Christ she's a creature but everything I thought I knew about Mary and Catholics was 100% wrong and a part of it as you were a Lutheran for a period and which as a Lutheran at least I don't know if he did as Unitarian but you would recite than I see and curry yes from time to time I grew up a Lutheran and so I knew that by heart and really getting to the point of appreciating the place of Our Lady in Salvation history the foundation of that is also understanding what we mean by the communion of saints in that little group of you five guys gathered around the Bible the your understanding of the communion of saints was probably coffee and doughnuts it's not understanding that we have this family right that we're working together important salvation of all biblically based Hebrews I think 11 we're surrounded by a great a cloud of witnesses I would be remiss if I didn't mention confession because that's the heart part of the journey to the Catholic Church it was when I prayed for forgiveness of my sins as a product to God hear me of course did he forgive me of course did I experience the forgiveness that's being totally complete no I struggled with my pet sins I struggled with them tried to overcome them I remember being at a Promise Keepers meeting in Detroit with thousands of men many of whom I had walked the Christian life with and that first night there was an altar call to come out if you have sins that you haven't confessed you need to come clean and be born again again and as I watch men walk down there that I knew had been faithful Christians for 15-20 years trying to unburden themselves with sin it dawned on me this is a substitute for confession this is like the Old Testament when the Jews would drag their Bulls up the hill for sacrifice and had to look at each other wonder what his sin was last night it was in our heart at dawn and me God has wired us to need the sacraments and in product in ISM I began to see there is a mimic of the sacraments unintended mimic of the sacraments like that night in Promise Keepers when I became a Catholic and went to confession for the first time it was one of the most liberating powerful experiences I'd ever had in my life I would have Kennett to that born-again experience that that young man back in college had that I felt psychologically morally religiously physically cleaned up in a way that I never did before I've lived 30 years without the sacraments I've lived now by the grace of God almost 11 years with them and I can tell you they do exactly what they say they're going to do another person that the five of you gathered around the Bible would not have given much thought to was the Holy Father yeah the place of the Pope yes in our lives as Catholics talk about that because till our law our separate brother don't quite know you know in exactly and when you come out of the Protestant movement into history I think one of your shows that you often like to say to be steeped in history is deceased to be Protestant well where do I go and it really only leaves you with two choices Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and orthodoxy is more comfortable you have more sprite to self interpret and we Americans don't like the idea of being under the rule of a Pope we weren't going to have any king from England and by gosh we're not going to have that king over there in Rome either so our American tradition doesn't open us to that but it was the Bible really it was Matthew 16:18 that whole quickly that as Protestant I was told oh no Peter was Jesus was building the rock on Peters faith but it belies that two other times in Scripture Christ was identified as as the Messiah once at the tomb when he raised Lazarus and and once Peter said it in John chapter 6 but it was there that he made Peter that that leader and that echoed back to the size a a 22 chapter the readers the listeners and viewers can go look that up but what institution to me as a historian could I go back and look at as an amateur historian and say what institution has had a complete succession since the beginning of Christ when I realized that Christ never in that infallibility was not did not mean that the Pope never made a mistake but that infallibility meant that the Pope would never teach err not that everything he ever taught was always true but that and the important things of doctrine that would lead the ship of state lead the church he would not he would not teach air it it was obvious that orthodoxy throughout periods of times in its history had actually taught heresy because it didn't have the papacy it's obvious today that that church is not universal in the scriptures Christ gives us four clues the church will be wholly unified apostolic and unified there is no church in the world that can claim all four of those pieces you know Catholic that's negative right and the unity if you take the head of the papacy out this is what Christ intended you remove the papacy you have what you have today you have you have doctrinal chaos one thing I might add that Christ seems to have come not just to simply create a new spiritual condition for man but he was replacing the dispensation of the Jewish religion entirely he wasn't replacing Jewish Authority he was replacing the Jewish religion and he's replacing the Jewish covenant now Catholicism claims that it's those three things the new covenant the new Authority and the new kingdom of God on earth visible kingdom of God on earth headed by his prime minister who has successfully had there been bad Pope's yes had there been sinful Pope's yes of course but throughout history I challenge anyone to go check the history and see how many times as the church actually taught something that was not true yeah the church especially we always encourage the audience to look at the Catechism when you have questions on any of these issues or you don't understand something it's the city of continuity between the old and the new the continuity the fulfillment as Christ is look forward to I'm gonna trace if you get well least one email sure okay Jeff Charles from Hillsborough writes how does one explain the need for a church to authoritative Lee interpret the Bible lots of my non-catholic friends just think that they can pick up the scriptures and that the Holy Spirit will guide their interpretation they don't see the need for anyone else to tell them what the Bible means well we find this in the scriptures itself we see I believe it's Acts chapter eight the Ethiopian eunuch is trying to read the scroll of Isaiah and Philip the Deacon arrives and says do you understand what you're reading and the Ethiopian eunuch says how can i unless I have an interpreter there we have Holy Scripture pointing that to us I think I think it was Peter that wrote some of the things that st. Paul writes you in his letters are hard to understand and evil men take those scriptures and twist them he warns us that they will take those scriptures and move them I think again the Scriptures also say that no matter of prophecy is ever a matter of one's own interpretation so embedded within Scripture we see that we don't have this right of interpretation and beyond that we have to understand that where is the fruit of that self interpretation taking us it's taking us to disunity it's it's as though it's as though the founding fathers of this constitution would create a Congress and a presidency and no Supreme Court to interpret it's it's the Magisterium in conjunction with the Holy Father and the history of the Catholic Church that interprets that book and I would say where did the Catholic Bible come from it came out of the Catholic Church it did not fall out of sky one of my presuppositions was I had to accept the idea that that the Scriptures pre-existed yeah well we didn't have an explanation we didn't talk to who knows when the five you've gotta run that Bible just assumed it was true they didn't ever talk about where'd this come from it I'm guilty of that my son all those years of the pastor but even we look at Galatians the beginning of Galatians Paul is already saying hey that's other Gospels out there already yeah private interpretation was that early and very early so they needed the authority of the church Jeff thank you so much Marcus on the day before this blessing and I hope the listeners and viewers were were touched by the things we both talked about today thank you and the Lord bless you and your continued work thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I hope it's an encouragement to your old walk of faith god bless you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 12,121

Rating: 4.7872338 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, EWTN, Christian, television, Catholicism (Religion), Protestantism (Religion), Unitarian, Lutheran, Methodist, JHT01408

Id: W_CKn2xjnl8

Length: 56min 11sec (3371 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2013