Journey Home - 2017-06-12 - Br. Martin Davis

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program thanks for joining us once again and it's very privileged in our program tonight to have seated with me brother Martin Davis Opie Dominican he's going to talk a little bit more about where your ad and your prepare your preparation for Brotherhood in the Dominicans but brother it's great to have you former United Methodist yeah most United Methodist don't wear outfits like that so here I've got a long journey that to hear so let me get out of the way first it's great to have you on a program well thanks for having me great to have you here but let me invite you to go way back and let's hear the beginning of your journey sure so I was born in Georgia and we went to United Methodist Church down there I was baptized United Methodist Church and my parents would take me to church and we always had Sunday school of course after after the service and we moved up to Michigan and I spent most of my years growing up in Michigan and being in the church there was great we got to hear about the gospel of Jesus and I was able to really kind of grow in my love of God there and there are a lot of great experiences I had would you say that it then is a young man that it had clicked that you had an awakening to Christ when you were young or was it more of a you know weekly once a week habit time I think it kind of grew over time so when I was really young I think with a lot of kids is they're not super excited to go to church every day and they're often spending time like reading something like a book or magazine in the pews when your parents are probably be encouraging more so but then it kind of grew and I developed an appreciation for religion and a deeper kind of love of God and I had a confirmation ceremony I went through there and the pastors I always have fond memories of them teaching us and I had confirmation class the pastor there and that was I mean it was all good good experiences but I always kind of wondered as I was growing up like is this like the church that Jesus really founded kind of thing because I had a lot of deep intellectual questions about what why there's a Methodist Church here there's a Pisgah pelion Church kitty-kat a corner to where we are now and there are all these different types of churches so why is this particular Church the one that I should be attending or what differences do we really have with all these different people and we never really discussed a lot of the differences early on but as I got older I would read more things start listening to more things and I got introduced to reformed theology I kind of in middle school and going into high school and that helped me kind of realize oh there are some pretty significant differences that these different people have on these different beliefs and that made me start to think about okay why why am I in this particular church you were up in Michigan for this time that's right that's right it is a pretty strong enclave of reformed expressions up in Michigan very strong so and it's quite a different theology than your Methodist course Methodist can be our all over the park too in their theology share but still the reform is quite a different than here than your Methodist upbringing yeah so the Methodist I mean they have kind of Armenian Wesleyan kind of theology of grace and in all honesty a lot of those issues weren't talked about in-depth early on there was a kind of maybe CS Lewis would call a mere Christianity that seemed to be kind of the bread and butter of these different communities and I think that often keeps people from really considering why they're in a particular church other than another or why shirt shopping for different denominations becomes more acceptable is because if everything is kind of basic in that sense and they don't dig down too much then okay that's all pretty much the same but where that started to come into a little bit of a crisis point though is I start really digging into the scriptures as I was getting older going to more Bible studies and I really started to enjoy that but you look in the scriptures like the word Trinity isn't anywhere in here so why do all these major denominations hold to this Trinitarian idea why do we have these Creed's in our big heme notebooks I've done that I sometimes miss some of those big heavy knoblauch so Catholic chemicals haven't always come along in the same way that the Protestant ones have at least in English I should say well the products want to have the harmonies that's right there you can sing your bass if you got a bass note and it's all there as opposed to just the melody which actually for the ladies and Catholics always just scared to sing enjoy in church but but yeah so why are we saying these Creed's why is theirs and why is there an asterisk next to the word Catholic and they have to go down and read the footnote about what they the lower sea Catholic means and everything like that so man there's no word for freewill and then in the Bible either so it was like well maybe like how does that fit in with this theology of grace as well so that was just got me really thinking and then you would even hear people would kind of propose things that basically sounded like Arianism as well and they would kind of point to maybe different places in John and say well that isn't doesn't this sometimes create problems for you for thinking about everything in this strict Unitarian sense and there's just enough kind of knots that were around there that's like oh this is this is a little more difficult to sort out and when I originally thought was like oh this is just this mere christianity everybody holds to this sixty-six book Canon everybody believes in the Trinity everybody has a kind of basic level of Christology maybe there's a disagreement on theology but everyone's pretty much on the same page right like oh well it turns out that it wasn't always the case and you even start looking around and digging a little further and you start to see more of these differences even within one denomination like the Methodist Church yep so those kind of things like okay well I got to start engaging this a little more because how do i how do I really know that this is the right doctrine man this speaks to the fact that your faith had become important to you that's right yeah I mean that's the ground line here it become important enough to make sure it's true and really I mean there's the baptism of grace was there the baptism of charism is there and it's amazing how God can work in all sorts of different ways and guide you in different ways and you'll kind of see that as my store kind of develops here but even from an early age having a love of God and interest in this it's something kind of fascinating retrospect and when we consider that we know that there are a lot of people who just don't continue that through middle school and high school and especially once they move out they tend to distance themselves they stopped attending any kind of church services and sometimes they come back when they have children but even that seems to be done away more and more but I mean I was kind of giving this love of God and that that grace there and in some ways if when confronted with the kind of more kind of what you'd call Armenian or Wesley and theology or something like that sometimes they can even in pop when it's really presented popularly can sometimes come across was like Pelagian or a very big focus on human effort as opposed to the grace of God and when that also wasn't necessarily my experience like well I have to start maybe I should look into more of this reformed theology as well and it also seems to have a realistic view of the fullness of mankind so maybe that is something to play there and I attended a few Calvinists Bible studies and churches but I never like really got all the way into that but so yeah that's kind of started really you can kind of see where all the foundations of these doubts sorry to kind of emerge you touched on such an important area because you've got the Wesleyan view and the reformed view and often what causes the barrier is that you're presuming it's either/or and you get stuck in the either/or there's either the the toll sovereignty of God and man does not have free will the reformed view or man does have free will but you can go so far as think well no it's our responsibility which is the Pelagian so you got this this battle here but the beauty is you were talking about some of these young people you knew didn't it didn't seem to catch for them why didn't it it reminds me of that wonderful parable that our Lord uses about the vine and the branches and our need to abide in him uses that wonderful imagery of you know a branch can wither it's a both hand you've got the the juices of the Holy Spirit and the grace coming but you have to act on it so both hand I guess you know what you weren't thinking about that but you were noticing the reality of that but some people caught it but you had caught it something in you had change and made you want to go deeper and so that's that responding to that creates yeah and I mean I eventually realized too that there had to be some kind of middle ground between like this hardcore reformed Calvinism one sense and this kind of maybe semi-pelagianism with maybe a non parallelism between salvation and reprobation if you will and that really the good things that are happening or happening because god's moving in our lives and when there is sin and when there is evil that there is in some way that it lays more at our at our feet we're both of kind of the more Pelagian side the Calvinistic side trying to destroy that and in some ways it's attractive because it provides more simple and some ways people think it provides maybe a more consistent view it's like well look is either all falling on God's sovereignty or it's all falling on your free will and with no nuance or really willingness to engage that then you can see how people can easily split into those two camps and I find a lot of Protestants Russell with the theology of grace which is interesting because out of all the kind of different areas within theology that one Protestants really seem to want to wrestle with but there isn't as much when it comes to the Christology or the Trinitarian things which is just kind of accepted but that kind of leads me back to like why are we accepting those things we're willing to debate the the grace issue here and to go back and read Calvin's Institute's different things like that but why do we accept the first seven or eight ecumenical councils or for ecumenical councils or where do we draw the line there yeah the interesting thing is that arts are good separated brothers and sisters often will argue they have no tradition it's just the Bible alone and they end up either reformed Bible alone or more Wesleyan Bible alone but what often happens is because it's a complicated issue how do I do I really believe in total sovereignty of God and I have nothing to do with this do I really believe that that I don't have any free will from our form stand I was reformed I really believe that you know my private moments or is it totally up to me and so what they often end up doing is listening to a key theologian they end up following a great reformed teacher he believes it so must be true you know or or Wesley believes it or agreed so they they end up having a tradition that they're following not scripture alone does always answer the question because the Bible loan doesn't answer that question yeah so I think because of that I that's started to make me doubt more of the Sola scriptura now that being said I mean the Wesleyan tradition does hold to like a primacy of the Bible but they do have this extra they have this like this square it's divided into four parts where so you have scripture but then you also have like tradition reason and experience that are kind of folded in there so there was a little bit of a recognition of that which is interesting and also the fact that John was they wanted his early ministers to be ordained by the Anglicans to have an attachment to apostolic succession was fascinating to me right but that kind of got pushed aside I think because I was kind of looking for it's like well what is the pure church here what has the true doctrine who's really living out the gospel and that was kind of the quest that I was on it's like okay we got to go find this because I don't know if it's here maybe it's here but I don't want to be so tied down to just what I happen to have accidentally stumbled into to say that I'm not going to consider any of this at all and I think it was also influenced by my high school in that I went to a high school with many people people of many different faiths so with Muslims and Hindus but mostly atheism agnostics and so that required a reflection on my own faith about why do I really believe in Christianity in the first place I why do I believe in God in the first place and I never really had the same kind of crisis moment if you will within that kind of sphere because I mean I always held that it's like I believe in God I believe Jesus is God and that never really left me but at the same time having to kind of reflect on that made me also kind of inspired to think that legal - found to find the foundations for why do I believe in what I believe and eventually would just become that I can't maintain my Protestant faith because it's just not intellectually viable for me to hold on to this and that at that point like I have to move somewhere else because I just don't I don't have the ability to intellectually assent to this anymore because I just can't I can't believe it our guest is brother Martin Davis so in other words your decision that you could no longer be Protestant had to do with these unanswerable assumptions that you had had all your life you you accepted them but what was the foundation for him it wasn't scripture alone you know I look at that fork squares of the Methodism and you can see how why why it's all over the place in the Methodist Church very pro-choice in some cases that on other issues in which which of the four corners do you lean on crazy it's crazy or I just cept a philosophy reformed as more of a philosophy than a theology a philosophy above do we have freedom is God totally in charge you accept a philosophy that becomes the grid which so you're saying I'm not buying any of that anymore it doesn't mean you were becoming Catholic yeah we're in the Catholic Church been in your life up to this point at this point I didn't I don't really care for Catholicism my impression of Catholics growing ABS like well they have like this Marion idolatry maybe or something and God forgive me but then and I did I wasn't really surrounded by a lot of Catholics who were like very deeply into their faith or at least that I was willing to prod enough to really see that because sometimes it's it's there it's a little more hidden and because of that I'd never even taken it seriously as an option for a long time and I was also looking to I mean I wanted to say okay I want to find like this this church that has the pure doctrine if you will but I also want to see a church that's really putting it to practice and has a liveliness to that so I had that young kind of evangelical fervor and there were some Calvinist churches that there were these kind of new like I guess non-denominational in some way where they they kind of sprout up they don't have connections to a deeper thing but they're very dedicated to like we have this theology of grace and when you have a lot of young people there with Bible studies and community service like oh this is kind of an attractive thing like they're living out their gospel they're digging into the word and they have the right answer on like the theology of grace or something or so I thought so that was a little bit of tractive but I was also attracted to the Salvation Army so when I moved off to college this is kind of the next part of the journey moving away from home going to college I started attending the Salvation Army Church and most people don't actually know that's a church I just think it's a charity and what I really liked about it is they had a deep dedication to helping the poor and the the lives that many of these people lived especially with what they call officers or their pastors was very inspiring to me because they lived a materially simple life and they were dedicated to helping all these people and I remember sitting in church and I was starting I mean I was still kind of wrestling with these doubts about doctrine and what was even harder with the Salvation Army's they don't have any of the sacraments so they don't even have baptism but they have a very spiritual eyes view of baptism which it's not it's not the baptism as the Catholic Church was consider it so because of that I'm sitting there having a lot of these doubts right it's like well it does say in Scripture like we have to baptized and it does say in scripture that unless we partake of the flesh and blood of Jesus we can't have eternal life so it seems like that's what at least plays somewhere into this and maybe we can spiritualize it a little bit but that doesn't as it seemed like I can go all the way but at the same time sitting around looking at all these people it's like there's something going on here in the sense that so many people are so dedicated to helping the poor and they have a preaching mission that was preaching a very kind of a simple view of the gospel and it's not going to be the most flushed out thing but they had maybe twelve or thirteen points that everyone had to assent to which is kind of their own Creed it's funny how that always keeps your emerging no matter what what you do no matter how anti Creed you try to go it ends up reemerging even and I remember when I when I was a corrugation so our Creed was no Creed but Christ that's a great agreed so I so yeah that was kind of I was kind of wrestling with that it's like there's something I definitely like here and in retrospect I think that was a little bit of the seeds being called to joining a religious order is oh I'm really attracted to this life of simplicity especially material simplicity and of really having a kind of single mindedness for the mission because I remember I mean these some of these pastors they would work 16-hour days they would a lot of times they do the Toys for Tots distribution and then after that they would have to go back and count all the money from the kettle's and they had all of these like AAA programs and homeless shelters and everything it's like this is there's something happening here and I was really impressed by that especially with how few personnel a lot of times they were operating with but I think there was a little bit of an inkling toward religious life there is that well look date you can live simply live for the Lord and have a kind of single-mindedness that is there and I think maybe there was something going on there and separate from society and being at the conscience of society the Salvation Army you know for the poor and for those that are in addiction and yeah I'm good great they even have uniforms too right and they have a tradition of music with brass music so so there was something there but ultimately I I still was wrestling with these kind of issues about theology and I was wrestling with why do we believe these early ecumenical councils but then we just stopped having any kind of Magisterium or could we really say that the one true church of Jesus Christ was founded by William Booth at some distinct point in time really late in time and I think that's what kind of got me started like I really have to look for something that has a more continuous tradition and something that has a principle of unity as well and that's very clearly starts to lead you to ok we need something with apostolic succession and we need something that has a visible source of unity which would end up being the Pope so you thinking these thoughts yeah or this is not just hindsight this is you were really really starting to think this at this okay because and part of what I think also got me thinking of those things was where I went to college so I went to Hillsdale College southern Central Michigan great school it's a great school and it's it was founded by frugal Baptist it doesn't have a but it doesn't really have a particular sectarian bent to it but so there are a lot of different Christian denominations there and some few people of different faiths but it is a very kind of Christian school and some in a certain spirit and so there are Catholic professors they're very into their faith and there are Catholic students there who are very into their faith we we had a 10 o'clock rosary every night I would always go down to which for college students that's early in the night so it's so no issue and so what kind of got me started thinking of the Catholic Church as a viable option was actually just reading Western civilization books so I remember reading the rule of Saint Benedict which was in our history book and I remember reading the letters and investiture controversy between Henry the fourth the Emperor and Holy Roman Empire and Gregory the seventh who is the Pope at the time and st. Gregory the seventh and those kind of things I think started to make me consider the Catholic churches more viable options like oh this there's a continuous kind of history of a that's been here didn't suddenly pop on scene 500 years ago and it's got a continually teaching Magisterium and Western civilization is really deeply rooted in this as well and also seeing the rule of st. Benedict was kind of interesting because as I said I had this kind of indication of well I like this idea of maybe a life set set apart that really wants to take on the worldliness by being a witness for Christ and a different way and so that was a little bit of a knit that previous kind of indication that God had given me through a special grace I think helped me realize like there was some truth in this and at the time I i was pretty adamant against the Catholic Church though when I would discuss with people and I'm sure if God willing to make the purgatory we'll spend a lot of years for that because I would argue against the Catholic doctrine or the Catholic doctrine as sometimes espouse would sometimes seeing semi-pelagianism misconception more than actual theology but in Catholic center at catechized as well live throughout their faith and the way they express it sometimes it's very accurate and it's a deeply complicated a mysterious issue - nobody's really like rooibos being able to stick it down in such a way to get rid of all debate but yeah so that was kind of the area where I was going in at my first year of college where are I'm really considering okay I have to figure out a foundation for this doctrine I'm attracted to this kind of life and I don't know really where I'm supposed to go because I feel kind of lost amidst kind of just Church shopping and yeah so you can kind of see how this progression ends up developing and an openness of the Catholic Church was not an openness to that church over there in the corner it was an openness to the church you were seeing in history or the church or seeing intellectual books or the right group jump because I mean I I think I had kind of been to part of a mass once but I had never really done anything but I do remember the first time and when I went to Mass and first mass it's kind of went there and and didn't really think too much of what was going on I was like kind of struck by as I go they've got like this procession and they seem to have some kind of liturgical tradition going on which were coming from a more low church kind of backgrounds like okay that's kind of interesting but I'm not used to that but it when was this you're wise so I was receiving the church in 2011 look and it would have been 2009-2010 where this this kind of process was meditating on Benedict was Pope the reason I was wondering is that it's hard to live it's one thing to about that church down the corner over there but hard to live today without being aware of pope john paul ii in the news or Pope Benedict and so there are many non Catholics that have a particular view of our Holy Fathers from what they picked up in the news it might almost different than what they feel about those Catholics down there at the corner did you have a thought about Pope Benedict or port John Paul the second at the time no I mean I remember when now now st. John Paul the second died I remember I was a member being in school and hearing about that and I kind of had a respect for him as a Christian leader of sorts because I didn't have any real ax to grind against Catholicism but I'm also like well they just got their own kind of traditions and I'm not really into and maybe it's mixed with some other things that I don't like so I mean I didn't really think too much of that and with Pope Benedict came on the scene it's like okay they've got another guy which when you were when I was really young I always thought john paul ii was just the only pope that had ever existed because they've been hope for so long when you're a 5 year old kid it's like yeah that's just the pope but then finally oh there's there's a different pope now but yeah I mean it wasn't any particular attraction or repulsion from the man who is currently in the papacy itself especially because I didn't really keep up with what's going on but alright brother bro our guest is brother Martin Davis and why don't we take a break there who and we'll come back in a moment and we'll pick up with you in college and starting to figure out oh yeah where you going to hang your hat sounds good cuz you're seeing all the different options and many of them are contradictory from one to another and what's the authority behind [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and our guest is brother Martin Davis former United Methodists and we've paused you in freshman year college would use at this point have still called yourself a Methodist are you kind of you said - you've just backed away from it all and get back with your faith but you're backed away from denominations yeah I think at that point it would be pretty difficult to pin me down as any denomination because I was very much floating around and unsure I remember being asked at one point my freshman year they know what denomination you it's like I don't know but yeah so at the end of my freshman year though I kind of started to explore more looking for resources on the internet about the Catholic faith and because I had this inkling - I need to look for some kind of app stock tradition and I came across some of these things online and we're talking about like well in piranhas there's really no way to have any definitive declaration on any kind of dogmatic issue nowadays like if there's some kind of knot that comes up or some kind of difficulty there's no way to have this kind of definitive way to settle it and even within eastern ether excuse me Eastern Orthodoxy there's still a little bit of that problem as well today because there isn't a kind of principle of unity that can really clearly set out okay this is what we're going to preach and this is what we're going to believe as has been received so that got me looking to the Catholic Church because it's like okay there's there's very clearly a kind of living tradition here and the apostolic succession that's been passed down is what became very attractive it's like okay it starts to make sense if we can say that it's not so much just about trying to look back to this one point in the early church it's like okay how can we reconstruct this pure Church in our house church or in this particular denomination or something like that as opposed to being deeply connected to a tradition that goes back and continues all the early practice of the early church but isn't necessarily some frozen point in time that we're always just trying to look back to an imitation in some kind of imperfect way and it started to really make more sense when you think about how the spirit must be acting in history because to really maintain Protestantism you'd have to maintain this idea that it's like well there was this early church of the Apostles that was pure and they knew all of John Calvin's five points and they had everything right - had all their understanding of the sacraments right and then somehow that was lost along the way and wasn't recovered until maybe the 1500 1600 1700 its 1800s it keeps just keep going and the idea that like God would just abandoned his people for over a thousand years or something sort of become impossible to really think it's like oh yeah the church was just gone or something so it's like well there may be issues with in different parts of the Catholic Church as far as like I I remember having problems with like the behavior of various Pope's within history or different things that I perceived as like oh this seemed to be kind of like a bad moral practice that was going on or with indulgences which is what you're always taught from an early childhood within Protestant is like whoa look they have this whole weird theology of grace that promoted this all of the selling of indulgences and then you really realize like oh there has to be a kind of a separation here between the failures of man on one part and what God is doing in the world and what God has preserved through all of history and I remember being told a story at one point where is in the story set in the Middle Ages and there's this businessman that wants to go to Rome and he's thinking about converting from Judaism to Christianity and the priest who's in the Paris air is just like I really just don't want you to go you're gonna see how bad all the corruption is down there you're going to see the excess and all the failures of man that have survived around the church and he goes down there and he sees everything becomes bad says okay I'm ready to convert to Catholicism I said well how could you like didn't you see everything it's like well look if God can preserve the church through all of that then it must have been to buying the created like yeah okay I see that it's a turning be arguments head a little bit but okay so the ability to separate okay they're these moral failures that happen at a certain point our even can happen in different points in history too okay this is a continuation of the doctrine that was taught by Jesus Christ was taught by the Apostles was handed down to these bishops which have a real power to actually connect the sacraments and that was also combined with reading a lot of stuff about the early church going back to the Western history kind of connection I would read the stuff about the Eucharist in the early church you'd read the decay you'd read saying the issues of Antioch you would read even the people who are criticizing the church and you realize like oh there's this is a really big deal to them and there was a really a powerful sense maybe it wasn't formulated in all the terms of transubstantiation quite yet but there really was a sense that with basically already pointing you there that this was a really big deal and they really did believe that this was the body and blood of Christ to the extent that they were facing substantial criticism for it and I said well if if we're going to have the sacrament we still have back then in the early church even if I'm still holding to this idea that we have to recreate this pure Church or something like that that's like well we have to look for that but that also has to be handed down to a priesthood and you can see very quickly how you end up in the Catholic Church just like well if we're going to have the sacraments we're going to have to have this and in some sense you could say my conversion was deeply Eucharistic in that way in the sense that I I'm going to Mass and I see what's going on like either this is just complete show and means nothing whatsoever in which case like why we here at all or this is really the center of our life there really wasn't a middle ground that I could maintain anymore it's like this was a huge part of the Christian life in the early church it's been thoroughly evidenced and even if you were trying to think well maybe some of this has been tainted by tradition another thing that kind of persuaded me to the importance of the Eucharist where the st. Thomas Christians in India where there's this kind of time capsule of sorts that Protestants would love to look into to say like well what would happen if we separated all this Roman stuff from the church and we ended up having the st. Thomas Christians who were in connection with the early church but then weren't really rediscovered until the Portuguese came over there and the result of that is like oh we discovered that they also are performing the sacraments and to have to be at a church like the Salvation Army where that wasn't going up became like an intellectually infeasible position to maintain so that's when you can start to see like okay now this is going to be something that's going to have to really inform my decision and then so they looking for an apostolic succession it's like well maybe it's the Catholics maybe it's the Orthodox or some some Eastern Church maybe with you at that point when you were talking about absolute succession when you're thinking about an accurate conveyance of the truth in other words it came from an Apostolic Church the way Tertullian would have said so in other words appetite succession is just the accurate handing on of words or were you talking about the ordination sacramental mystical passing on of that way at that point where were you thinking I think it was both I don't think I made as big a distinction so with my ideas that well the truth that's going to be passed on it's going to deeply informed practice of what's going on as well so as comes one so should come the other and so if I'm looking for something that has a pure doctrine it also has to have the sacraments that have to be there and if it's going to have the sacraments it also has to have some kind of way in which that can really be passed down so all of that kind of has to kind of come together as a package deal because to go to some place where oh well they're teaching what's true but it's not really being put into practice really when it seemed to work especially I mean if you see everything is just a kind of a human institution then maybe you can maintain that position but if God is at work there having the place that really has his truth not be put into practice in any kind of way and not just as a consideration of like okay there are these moral failings the church but just a complete absence of the sacraments and a complete absence of the Holy Orders passing down the ability for these sacraments to continue like okay there if the Holy Spirit is really working then these things shouldn't be ripped apart from one another so at that point I'm like okay if we're going to look for app select a session we've got the Orthodox maybe the Anglicans and the Catholics maybe some of these Eastern Churches but there was no with a lot of these I mean with the Anglicans it seemed like okay we're starting to get more more away from some of what the medieval church was teaching in a way that seems to be kind of a break with tradition and but within with the Orthodox and with England's well that didn't seem to be a kind of principal beauty that would really hold it everything together and to continue it and that's where the Catholic Church really started to make sense it's like okay it would make sense that Christ would have appointed an apostle with the ability to pass down a certain Authority that would give him primacy and because as a Protestant you look to places like the the passage in Matthew and I say okay well maybe there's something there but look we have all these qualifications but then when you return to it with this kind of light of like look I've ventured into the world of what that kind of theological conclusion leads me and it leads me to 33,000 denominations with a bunch of conflicting views on the most basic things like we have to find some principle of unity that's here and that's when I kind of gave up a lot of those individual private judgments and was a John Henry Newman talks about this a lot is the dogmatic principle is that we have to really believe that God did really reveal some kind of dogma and that somebody has it and that it isn't just a matter of me trying to figure out what is right on all these particular issues and even today with a lot of people who are wrestling with these issues trying to come to the faith I seen people trying to engage in that kind of approach and it seems very difficult to me to try to go it's like okay well I'm going to find a church that agrees with me on the Trinity and on Christology and on Grace and I'm a sacraments and so I'm going to check on my boss Lux's and see if it works that seems like the wrong approach where divine faith is a perception of a gray sets been given for us to be able to for wills to be able to move our intellect to assent to truths that are unseen and it's a kind of a conformity to God as the first truth and it's not about me trying to evaluate these things through private judgement if you're trying to find proof text for everything in the Bible when you realize like oh that's kind of a fruitless judgment so the thing that really I gave the final blow though actually was reading Martin Luther's introduction to the books of the Bible and so when I started going through there and you read the introduction to for example the book of James because it conflicts with his theology of faith alone then he's went to just basically throw this out as non-canonical and that's not the only book either or some people some people know that but they also is like oh these other books here there of course there's the deutero canon from the old testament that he wants to get rid of as well but that made me realize like the foundation of having a kind of tradition that is solely based on the bible it's going to be sure nearly difficult to do that we really do have to look for an apostolic succession that can pass us down all the tradition that is necessary to both establish the Bible and to also have some kind of keyhole to be able to understand what the Bible is really saying and also what I would later discover to be able to teach us things that go beyond just what is in the Bible other truths of tradition as well and with that kind of realization that's when I basically said why I have to become Catholic at this point there's no way for me to intellectually maintain any other position and but then I mean the process isn't complete though with that kind of thing now it's not complete with just okay I realized intellectually this has to be the case but so then I attended Mass and I remember the first mass where I believed and I was given the grace to believe in the Eucharist and that was a very powerful experience and God moves every part you're being not just the intellect but the heart is well and will and so that's when I was really moved through attendance of mass and through praying and I pray the rosary almost every night like I said at 10 o'clock and that's really kind of what helps that conversion along and help the totality by being to be oriented toward this and that was a great settling of all these different fears about am I really in the true church because it's like well we have this place to look for which we can submit and submit in a way that isn't irrational to because I think a lot of people will think as Protestants that we look to the Catholic Church and okay you're just basically giving up on your intellect because you're just gonna say well whatever that guy says whatever the Pope says that's right and I'm not really going to investigate that or something like that and that's not really the case nor is it the case on the opposite extreme that it's a question of private judgment where look I've gone through the whole list of theological issues I assent to what the Pope has said therefore on the catheter but it's a kind of informed idea of like okay I understand that this is the true church that has been established by Jesus Christ and it has all the necessary components of being one Holy Catholic and apostolic and once I've realized that then so on the some of the finer points I am going to have to turn to the teaching but it's not as if it's a completely a rational assent to something else it's like God has provided us with credible external evidence to say that this really is the case and then within the life of the individual person grace can move them to be able to really fully ascend to the this and their intellect and will and to be given that grace of divine faith that doesn't destroy the intellect but heals and perfects it and I think that misunderstanding can help a lot of people and help people realize that it's not one of this irrational submission nor is it just checking off boxes and I think that process kind of took place coming the following year going to our say everything like that and I was confirmed in 2011 our guest is brother Martin Davis you know john paul ii put out that wonderful encyclical veritatis splendor' and which basically he's saying that from a Catholic perspective we want you to think there's no fear of thinking that faith leads to understanding right not the other way around and if we wait until it understanding gets it all together for we believe we'll we'll never get there it's faith builds the foundation for it the reformed position when you start thinking it through wait a second I have no free will you know I can't even move this thing with it you're not allowed to think that way you're not allowed to think you have to accept a philosophy even though it runs counter to what reality is in life you have to these alternext book so really the Catholic position offers much more boundaries to think but but the church does say you know like the old analogy I think CS Lewis said you know where does a train most free to run when it's on the tracks or off the tracks when it's on the tracks and so God guides us for that and I would say are kind of interestingly with this I think the idea of salvation by faith alone has contributed to this problem in the sense that we as Catholics we believe that faith hope and charity are all necessary for salvation and that is actually possible to have faith without charity but the so the what's interesting about that is because hope and charity are more seated in the will kind of seat and seated in the heart that it allows us to have an understanding of faith that still maintains a kind of respect for the intellect that it's not just this kind of crutch that people who are too emotionally weak to make it through the problems of life have to lean on or something like that which I think a lot of atheists and agnostics think about faith it's not some kind of irrational just pure choice of the will and because of that there can still be this way to maintain an idea that faith is a perfecting light and there still is an obscurity in faith because it's dealing with things that are unseen right yeah but it is also a perfecting thing and it's a substance of the things that are hoped for as it says in Hebrews 11 so I think when you try to collapse just a faith alone and there's this bondage of the will that Luther talks about that you get that kind of aspect of salvation that requires the engagement of the will and a more profound way which Catholics say I mean the intellection will are involved in all of these things but those are especially kind of involved in hope and charity is when you have to collapse at all of the faith the Meccan sometimes push out that kind of intellectual bent to what faith actually has as being a virtue that perfects the intellect and so I think I'm in retrospect obviously because I do anything about that what happens a Protestant it's like there is something to that is that the Catholic Church is able to maintain a kind of respect for the intellect which I think can sometimes get chopped off actually by faith alone which you would originally think that that would be the doctrine that would destroy it but in some ways I think the emphasis has caused that to happen when they're not in necessarily entails an old joke about an elderly Lutheran pastor who's on his deathbed in this family a samar you know father are you sure you're going to go to heaven he says I know I am because I've never done a good work in my whole life well you know that's pushing it way too far you know we shouldn't wait too far and that's where that that faith alone ends up and almost at the point of it doesn't matter how you live your life now long as I have faith but you're hearing in garb how's it happen so at the beginning my conversion didn't come along with my any kind of immediate called I felt to religious life but I got my degree in finance of math and I started working in finance and I realize like this is not only does it have various ethical problems that I'm concerned about but just doesn't seem fulfilling and like I was talking about earlier I kind of had this inkling that kind of came up with looking at the Salvation Army or looking at the rule of Saint Benedict of I think I would like kind of turning my life over and a kind of single mindedness of living for Christ that religious life would have to offer so that's when I started looking at religious orders and the Dominicans in the Franciscans seem to be particularly attractive to me because they were kind of in a middle ground between the monastic side and deeply contemplative and a more active life on the the other hand which exists in some different orders and that kind of hybrid active and contemplative life which is both dedicated to prayer and the nasa conservancies but also with this kind of outward facing apostolate and mission attracted me so I visited the Franciscans and Dominicans I ended up finding out that I felt a good fit with Dominicans and I felt that call from God and so I felt that this is where I really should end up looking and I applied and I entered the division in 2014 and took simple thousand 2015 now I'm in my second year of post novitiate formation and the house of studies in Washington DC and I'm in formation to be a cooperator brother which is something that it's just different not sure so most people don't know that there are brothers that exists and some of these orders even when they have a lot of priests and so they're in the Dominican Order there have been different Saints and blessed's that have like st. Martin de Porres who's my namesake who was a cooperator brother and Saint YMCAs and brothers acting in the order have always kind of been there and have helped facilitated a mission of preaching which is at the core of Dominican life and because they've generally been a minority sometimes I haven't always been noticed as much as opposed to where the Benedictines we generally have more brothers in proportion to the priest but I felt a deep calling to religious life I'd liked the charism of the Dominican Order I like st. Thomas Aquinas was a big influence in the order I like the stories of st. Dominic and as a result I felt called to it and I didn't feel a call to be a priest and a lot of people say well if you're going to be celibate everything like why don't you just go go the whole way or something as if celibacy is like the admission price to becoming a priest or something like that as opposed to being something where you can really dedicate your life to God and something that can be transformative and worthy for its own sake so that's kind of how I ended up becoming a brother okay you know what you said the Eucharist was one of the main cause that brought you into the church and if you look at your background Methodist which again because of the broad spectrum of Methodism you can have a kind of a high understanding of the Eucharist or didn't use you right and use the word Eucharist but or a very symbolic view whereas in the Calvinists reformers using more of a symbolic view but the uniqueness of seeing the Eucharist from a sacrifice standpoint is so uniquely Catholic talk about that if you would how different that is seeing it through the eyes of a sacrifice compared to your background yes in the background will be I wasn't really given a lot to like hang my hat on within Methodism and it there was any of that in the Salvation Army so in the Catholic Church it's like oh there's a deeper kind of theology that's going on here which I think helped me to understand why we were really doing this and the idea that we're participating in Calvary in some way through the sacrifice of the mass helped me to understand why this is here because sometimes when it's so disjointed away from that kind of theology it becomes difficult to understand why the sacraments are still there why we have certain liturgical practices so having that kind of deep understanding and understanding it in a way that doesn't detract from the glory of across either because that's often a criticism that you see that being able to fully realize that I think helped me greatly appreciate the sacraments and realize how God is continuing to work in the church even though there was a definitive act for the salvation of us all and the great amount of writing that's in within the Catholic tradition like greatly helps me on that alright we have an email Matthew from Long Island writes my wife and I have been dialoguing with the Protestant pastor and he doesn't have much familiarity with the structure of the early church and how apostolic succession is evident from the earliest years of Christianity I was wondering if you have any ideas for how to compellingly make the case for APIs like succession in ecumenical II sensitive way hmm so I guess an easy way to look is to try to pull up documents from the early church is that Church didn't suddenly end as soon as the the last word the Canon was written and that if you start looking at things from all of these different early writers you realize okay there's a deeper connection that's there where they have the Apostles who are gaining bishops who are ordaining the priests and everything like that and that can seem be seem really early on so I think kind of looking at those documents early helps a lot of people and Newman says like as soon as you really immerse yourself in history you cease to be Protestant so I think that's a way because you have something that's kind of this third part of it presented to be an ecumenical a friendly way is I here are these different documents that we have here to kind of look at as opposed to this okay here's the Catechism let me read it to you kind of thing and I think even just getting people that ball rolling even if those things aren't immediately persuasive when you start immersing yourself in the history it's pretty hard to maintain I think a Protestant view of your Holy Orders yeah I can remember satiric Nasir Ignatius that described in detail the the succession of bishops in Rome and how the churches in Germany at the time at the same faith as the churches in Jerusalem and in Rome and the issue was the connectivity with those who had passed it on you always going to check in on who'd you hear this from so it was always that connection because even I love you don't realize even very early on there were people trying to the devil was inspiring people to create alternative options these other churches but and those other options that ended up being extraordinarily different for Protestantism though it sometimes presents will look back like oh well there was this early descends but it's like you don't want to go down that route because it's way different from what you think it is and I think once people realize that they realize okay there's both it an early need for the status taluk succession to out the church and there has been dissent in the past but it's not as if there's this continual line of dissenters that have passed down the pure church but there's really there's just one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church as pass it down to us and whenever there has been a separation from the line of bishops you see a separation in all sorts of different ways that ends up cropping up and even with the Lutheran Church is what you may have expected to be one Protestant Church end up developing into a whole plethora of different churches you know yeah and you know those that want to hold to the Bible alone and its infallibility which we agree with the inspiration of Scripture of course but when they throw out APIs like succession they throw out any reason to believe that it's trustworthy that's right how do they can and get here did this fall from the sky or something like that like no we needed some some people to really pass down to say definitively this is what we have received as from the Holy Spirit and I think once people realize that and going back to my point about Luther's introduction you realize that the Canon stands on pretty shaky ground if you don't have any kind of tradition is that we need the tradition to have the Bible in the first place brother thank you very much for joining us on the program brother Martin Davis thank you very much in and God be with you as you continue your studies thanks for having me thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I do pray that brother Martin's journey is an encouragement to you god bless you see you next [Music] you you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 10,738

Rating: 4.927928 out of 5

Keywords: JHT, JHT01573

Id: 5wCX-aV-QFI

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2017