Journey Home - 2017-08-28 - Bryan Cross

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi euros for this program thank you for joining me each week we have this time to sit down and listen to a story and we're gonna do that tonight our guest is dr. Brian cross we list a lot of things in his past a former Pentecostal former reformed Presbyterian angled gun but dr. cross it's great to have you join us on the journey home it's good to be here Michael all the way from Iowa that's right all right all right so it's good to have you here I'll get out of the way soon as I can let's let's hear you start your journey where you came from as a child did you have a religious background I did I was raised in a Pentecostal tradition my parents and my grandparents were Pentecostal and my grandmother is a Pentecostal still alive she'll be 100 in about two months and my my great-grandfather whom I who died when I was 15 he was a Pentecostal pastor as well on my father's side so that that takes them back almost at the start of American Pentecostal is it's right he was born in 1890s and so not too long after the beginning of Pentecostalism so that's a rich heritage in my family and something in this in the sense that we're proud of in a way that the piety and the devotion and love for God in my family something I'm proud of yeah and and we recognize when we look at the statistics that still Pentecostalism to one of the fastest growing Christian traditions in America right that's right that's all it leaves any particular Pentecostal slant sliver in that group my family on both sides of my family it was Church of God Cleveland Lee Lee College and Holy University and and growing up we also went to the Assemblies of God okay so both of those two traditions all right all right so from a very early age you were involved with a very enthusiastic committed Christian tradition right we would go to church every Sunday morning but also Sunday nights and Wednesday nights - and if there's occasional bible school other than that in the summers and any revivals and sunday schools so we were really focusing a lot on Scripture so something that's something that we did all I was read scripture learn scripture and that's something I'm very thankful for because growing up by the time I got to you know high school I had read the whole Bible and was very familiar with all the stories and so that's something that you know you can't you can't replace that as a child something just goes into you you know non Pentecostal Christians can sometimes be labeled as strong on the father strong on our Lord and not very strong on the Holy Spirit and almost emphasizing the Trinitarian is a minus one and times you know or as Pentecostalism can sometimes be the opposite way you know with your experience a good balance I think so I had some good Pentecostal teachers I mean youth pastors but also a pastor in particular who really focused on Scripture I think he kept that balance so there was an experiential dimension a kind of in a good sense an awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit in us all the time and so kind of a tune to being attune to the spirit which i think is very valuable and to the presence of God the indwelling presence of the whole experience that we're my mom would say you're a temple of the Holy Spirit right so take care of that temple because there's the Holy Spirit in you but at the same time that that kind of focused on Scripture kept us of balanced in that way what about you as a young man was it was was the faith alive faith was alive but I hadn't really internalized it in a way that was personalized until I got to be a senior in high school and end of my senior in high school I began to take it more seriously and start to ask the Lord what he wanted me to do with my life and who was i living for you know was I living just for fun and party or whatever but was I following God in following his direction for my life so that's the question I began to wrestle with as a senior in high school you were disturbing a call to ministry well just general just kind of a general what is the Lord want to do with me and just that that's that's when the switch really took place from kind of doing what I was just doing whatever I wanted but being a Christian on the side as it were that's something I do on Sundays too okay Lord my life is yours what do you want me to do with it right that's the transition that took place then so I began to ask the Lord and so I came to the conclusion that what the Lord want me to do was become a missionary but through medical training so that's what I decided to do I went to college University of Michigan and pursued prepared for studying medicine in medical school so I can become a medical missionary yeah well I mean it's you know it does fascinate me Bryan because you know your professor philosophy but if you want to think of it this this conviction that you had as a young man Lord what do you want me to do I mean that's that in itself is a unique philosophical conviction as opposed to what do I want to do you know or what makes sense in the world or what are my gifts Lord what do you want me to do I mean then that is a unique work of grace in your life as a young man I agree I think it came from the tradition that I was raised in that God is God and we are his subjects and it's not slavery in any kind of negative sense to serve God it's actually freedom and joy and so Lord what do you want me to do is the way to true freedom true life and I understood that at that point thanks be to God by grace yeah yeah well again the work of grace right awakening within you that desire but yet you still have the freedom to respond to that you could say there you know but you know so well medical missionary I mean how far did you get in that path well I went to the University I did a degree in cellular molecular biology preparing for med school got into med school at the University of Michigan so started there and right there as when I got married I met my wife and while we were in college and while I was in college too I should say I started attending nondenominational services and in Arbor Michigan there and so I was exposed to to students and to people of many different Christian traditions as opposed to more a pentecostal exposure when I was younger so that already kind of challenged things a little bit I knew had friends that were Catholics and Presbyterians and losers and so that there's a kind of NACA Medical dimension there any an arbor at the time and not even a few of your science biology profs trying to undercut your faith a little bit I don't know if you had any of that at the experience that in fact at the University of Michigan at the time the anatomy professors I think we're all Christian and I think part of that was just the magnificence of the human body it's just hard to learn but I knew that so that was something actually supportive of the faith but I came to a crisis while I was in medical school and the crisis was trying to reconcile the science dimension of reality with human and faith dimension mentioned liberal arts earlier that whole side of reality of something that couldn't fit together in the mornings we were doing these mock patient interviews for patient histories where you take a medical history of someone and they weren't just volunteers in the afternoon there were gross anatomy aware we're just cutting up cadavers right and so I couldn't reconcile these two aspects of the day as it were because they didn't seem to fit together and what I realize now I was reconcile I was working with a philosophy kind of scientism that was trying to be comprehensive in its explanation of human function you know in terms of science and I didn't see how to fit that with with faith and what I knew about just human experiments right so I decided to leave medical school which is a very big decision at the time not knowing how to go forward from there so we started you know I was thinking about the the good it seems to me that a good image of that is heart and heart you know we have the heart that physical thing you're dealing with any afternoon yeah and then heart which could be sold person all right all of that how do you put those together right I felt like at the time that I had to choose between them and I didn't like that choice because I once they want to be anti science but alpha want to give a heart in that sense of the soul the human person dimension something I didn't know how to reconcile I just didn't have the philosophical tools to do it at that point all right yeah so we started some my wife and I we started a Bible study with international students from Indonesia at the time because of that missionary emphasis that we were thinking about and then I realized that I didn't really know Scripture and theology as well as I needed to so we decided to go to seminary and it's during this time that I became reformed through reading some books I found at the local bookstore and for the audience you mean capital R before capital R reformed Presbyterian right Calvinist yeah so I started reading you know Calvin and some John Gerstner and people like that and decided to go to protestant seminary Presbyterian seminary in the st. Louis Missouri covenant somewhat early in my wife was from st. Luke's anyway so we can move back there and I could go to seminary so I did that but that is a big jump from Pentecostalism traditional Pentecostalism to that conservative that's true reformed that's true but I think at the time when the way I looked at it is I was being more true to Scripture okay right so being faithful to Scripture is what I had always been committed to even in the Pentecostal tradition so maybe I thought I was taking Romans 9 more seriously in certain passages like that that I had sort of just not dealt with very well as a as a Pentecostal at that age right so so we made the move to just name Louis and started seminary and went through four years of seminary and then my last two years of seminary I started taking philosophy classes at the st. Louis University on the side has a were right I start taking graduated classes there and st. Louis University is in a Presbyterian school correct it's a Catholic it's a Jesuit school right now and we started reading st. Thomas Aquinas the class on a metaphysics of st. Thomas Aquinas now I had done some a little bit of reading before and the fish sticks but this was a different level of study and just really immersing myself and into Aquinas was a challenge for me the Protestant because he's not very Protestant so he was raising points and questions in the way he appealed to the church fathers for example sort of bothered me at the time it bothered me because he treated the church fathers in an authoritative way and I wanted him to be in peeling instead to Scripture so this troubled me and I had a philosophy teacher at the time who said here's what she said to me she said st. Thomas was not a deist about the church and those words really stuck with me because of like a you know just got in me that needled me you know because I didn't want to be a deist about the church or about God at all so how did I understand the church fathers and in it I realized that I had assumed that the church fathers were had departed in some way from the faith handed down by the apostles this occurred to me because right after I finished seminary some Mormons came to our house I mean within weeks of graduating from seminary so it was all fresh the Greek in the Hebrew with that okay I could just just point them right description well they started coming every week because we were just my wife would write the men give them lemonade she's very hospitable and I was completely unsuccessful every time I would I would try to point to Scripture they would point at the Book of Mormon and take a different interpretation and then I would appeal to the Nicene Creed and they didn't accept that as an authoritative and they'd say well we think the church fell away you know that those people fell away in the first century and a nice well that's so soon and they say well when do you think the church said well maybe the fifth or sixth century in the I realized that I didn't really have a principled distinction between when I thought the church had fallen away and when they thought the church had fallen away it's just a few centuries different and I didn't like that today it was an ad-hoc or arbitrary way of deciding when to accept the church and when did not accept the church and the council's and the Creed's because there's multiple strong I mean convicted explanations of when the church fell away depending on what your particular tradition whether it's for sensory second sensory third century brain injury our guess is dr. Brian cross I'm gonna back up just a sec sure you had said you didn't want to have a deist view of the church you know explain that to someone out there what you meant by not having a deist view of the church well the term deism was very familiar to me as a Protestant you know as a seminarian because that's one of those views where God just creates the world and it sort of backs away and lets it run on its own so it's we contrast theism and deism right where the theism is God's providential involvement in the world is continual and constant and we believe that as Catholics do right I didn't just make the world and let go but he's continually governing the world and guiding the world providentially so this idea of deism with regard to the church is that Jesus found as a church you know and then he just goes up in heaven and says you know good luck you know sort of lets it run on its own and lets it fall off the rails yeah right and that idea that that would be a kind of failure on Christ's part it would reflect that in a way it would sort of call into question Christ's divinity that was a challenge that st. Thomas gave to me that if Christ is God then the church that he founded will not go off the rails and that's how he understood and taught this is actually the gates of Hell will not prevail against you know especially very conservative non-catholic Christians that wanted to Bible only perspective and limit what they can know about truth by what's written in here can almost have a position just like you said Jesus chose these 12 guys and gave them almost no instructions at all about anything in the church and run with it which is why you have I don't want to mention names but you can have some very right now contemporary liberal New Testament scholars that almost believed that everything that came about in the church was created later called later everything was a free-for-all until these consoles came around and forced some kind of quote orthodoxy on all these free groups you know that's a modern running idea right but but at all that's based on this idea of a deistic view of understanding the church just got started it gave it maybe some instructions or none at all right just kind of let it run yeah we have st. Paul saying that God is not a God of disorder but of order and so if Christ set up his church surely he taught them what to do in some sense of how to set it up and so there was an orderly way of handing on doctrine hitting on practice handing on Authority yeah you know and this other thing that you talked about and you go out and evangelizing and you're gonna you're gonna use this book as Authority you know it says here but if that person doesn't hold this book is authoritative then that argument doesn't hold any water right which what you were in counting with those Mormons right with the Book of Mormon in their case right okay yeah okay so what happened then at that point for you with the the Mormons and you I mean the issue was you didn't want have ideas for you of the church right and it's this is a long process as it isn't happen overnight so it just wrestled with that how do I avoid this deist view of the church I came to see that really there were two different pictures or paradigms as I wasn't Sarah my views now and I had been working in one paradigm this idea of it well the church fell away and here's where we turn to now and that's how we derive doctrine but then I started to see a different paradigm as I turned to the church fathers this took a little bit this was a little bit down the road it wasn't fully reading the church fathers yet I was just reading Aquinas that led me into the church fathers but in the meantime I became an angle again so after seminary my young my youngest daughter was born and she was very sick so she had to be in the hospital and mushiya almost died she was very difficult situation with her so there was a period of time where I was not even attending mature she was immunodeficient so if we were trying to protect her in the hospital from germs and but but also I was just really wrestling with these deeper theological questions I was when I was attending church I found myself thinking as a still of Presbyterian Church I was thinking you know I could be learning agustin or reading a Kiwanis or something and I I don't want it I was dealing with theology up here and religion was all up here in my head and my head was getting in the way and so I found myself critiquing sermons in an unhelpful unhealthy way and my friends one of my friends said to me why don't you just go visit an Anglican Church okay I'll try it and so I did I went over to one of the nearby Anglo churches and I just walked in I knelt down in the pew with a kneeler and I was so moved by the liturgy and and by the the communion just because it didn't address me propositional II primarily the propositions were there in the liturgy of course but it was the words of God being said in the liturgy not human speculation I put it that way and the way Christ was presented to me was in the sacrament right in the communion so I couldn't argue with that right it wasn't something I could hold an objection to it was Here I am you know in a participatory way Christ is giving to me giving himself to me so it bypassed this whole intellectual obstacle that in my mind was putting up it allowed me just to to pray and to feel more with God again so the liturgy was a way of the introduction of liturgy it was a way of kind of really helping me hold on to the faith at that time when my daughter was sick well was your wife on the same journey with you not so much at the same time you know so she was still going to the Presbyterian Church and so that created some tension with us for a while yeah but I said too right I just never want to co I never want to leave the letter James I want to hang on to the liturgy I recognized to to the liturgy was something that has its long history in the church and it goes way back so discovering it was like discovering something that had been hidden to me yeah I was gonna say moving from Pentecostalism to to reformed Presbyterianism to anglicanism is it is a journey into liturgy is a journey into history right for you I mean going back deeper and deeper in this right historical faith right so there's always like there's something more there's something more I keep peeling things back yeah right yeah so when eventually we we my wife was came to terms with this a bit by becoming Anglican and we found something that we could agree on and we joined the Anglican Church and shortly thereafter I started really reading the Church Fathers and really just pouring myself into them as much as I could everything I could get my hands on and a friend of mine said to me well why aren't you Catholic he didn't say you should become Catholic he just said well why aren't you Catholic and I try to give him some immediate answers but I wasn't wasn't satisfied myself with those answers answers like Mary and the papacy and purgatory and things like this and but I thought well I'm kind of just begging the question that's that was my philosophical internal I'm just presupposing precisely what's in question and so I was dissatisfied with that because I I knew it wasn't an intellectually honest answer it's just happened to be where I was right and I had other friends too we were talking about ecumenical questions we we were interested in church unity but then we we were thinking well should we become a Catholic or not well no if we became Catholic that would betray this idea that we're all Catholic with a small C you know whatever denomination or tradition that we're in and we wanted to affirm and hang on to that of Catholic with a small C so the particularity of Catholicism with a capital C that was a bit scandalous to me so at the time but then as an Anglican first reading the Church Fathers and then seeing how they understood ecclesiology for example the idea of schism my sauce schism is this idea of schism in san agustin with the Donatists innovations earlier right and st. Jerome and Origen talks about schism and saying I've taught as talks about schism schism this concept of schism has in addition to heresy as something distinct from heresy was something I had never really thought about and studied as a Protestant and it bothered me because it it showed that the church was not just this kind of set or collection of people who either were elect or were professed the same creed or faith or something but there was a visibility to the church right a kind of hierarchy and you could be in fellowship where you could be out of fellowship even if you had the same beliefs as Acosta and the Donatists it wasn't like they had different radical beliefs so much it was just they were not in communion it so that that picture of the church as being a visible Church that was part of this new paradigm that I hadn't discovered before yeah so that's one thing you think about that first Corinthians 3 passage where Paul is being critical of the Corinthians because they're they're dividing up in these groups I'm a Paul I'm a Peter of Cephas you know I'm up Jesus you know and and it's true he isn't so much dealing with a harris seat here you know he's doing with with the the seedbed of of schism right you know I'm not I'm not United with you I'm not even there's no unity with you and that's what he's attacking also the other place is talking about bad doctrine but he's attacking that schism and so the heresy can lead to schism is the danger of heresy but you could be schismatic and yet hold the exact same doctor right right yeah so the problem is this unity which we share in Christ that we can't touch the Gustav was pretty strong about that he was it was I mean it's like it's a grave matter for them excuse me and and that's I mean I understood those passages from st. Paul in in a kind of local church way only you know so this church breaks with this church and that's bad and we shouldn't let it but I never understood them in a universal sense the idea of not just separation from another particular church but separation from the Catholic Church right so that concept was one that was new to me and troubling to me because when I got to the creed we'd say the Creed every week right and a Sunday and I would say I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church I started to realize that when I said the word one I wasn't saying it in the same sense that I saw in the early church fathers and that dishonesty forced me eventually to just stop speaking at the time that point every Sunday when we got to that part of the Crete I'd just couldn't say that that word one because I knew that I when I was saying it I was equivocating on the term of making it have a different meaning than I had for them I was using in the sense of we're all one no matter how separated we are in terms of communion but they meant in terms of communion right and so I wasn't really being truthful if I said it had a different sense to the term that makes sense and I'm guessing it isn't just that you were uncomfortable with the the falsity of claiming oneness in relationship to Catholics and other Christians but even within Anglicanism yeah I guess you were probably aware of of the problems with in anglicanism I mean we're right I don't want to point fingers at this point but that's a struggle it is right for sure and so merely being a collection of churches isn't the same thing yeah but but already even as an Anglican the transition from Presbyterian to Anglican required believing something about apostolic succession that I had to recognize before as a presbyterian so i started looking at the question of ordination what does that mean and what did the church fathers teach about ordination in that study kind of really it was another point that really shifted me over toward you at that point still thinking about ordination no this was after that okay so you know law that was no longer a personal issue you were considering that's right yeah right after I left seminary right as I was leaving seminary decided not to pursue a work nating so at this point it was just for what what is it genuine ordination right and who who gets to decide that and the church fathers answer this question and so that you know you have to distinguish between an authentic ordination and an inauthentic or in order ordination and well that's a really important question you can just now that you can just mail something in and get ordained right and okay that's obviously wrong so what counts as an a genuine ordination and that led me to the doctrine of apostolic succession so now we have apostolic succession we have a distinction between bishops and priests and and all that and so that's how I could accept that as an Anglican at that point but still the question of unity persisted because if you have multiple bishops and they're not in communion well where is the church Christ found it right right I think it is true that in the early church writings it's not always clear between the designations bishop and priest him there's some overlap right except for at least one area only the bishops could ordain right that's right any even the terminology sort of overlapped the first century and even into the second century as time went on the church was clarifying that distinction in concept and that's a fascinating study and myself ordination as you said this was pretty singular from the beginning in terms of who had the authority to do that right you couldn't just I mean I know as a Protestant and I'm it might have been true in Pentecostalism you take that scripture wherever two or more gathered my name there am I in the midst of you okay well that's a church right wherever a couple people gathered and then laying out of hands that constituted ordination and there was no sense of do I have the qualifications to do this right and if I were just using scripture to answer that question sure you can see how that answer would come about but what change for me was okay I'm not just using a scripture to answer this question what did the Church Fathers teach about that how did they practice this and if that has some Authority and weight that changes how you can answer this question all right right right when we pause right now is your time for a break we'll take a breather and then we'll come back and find out your next step as you dealt with apps like succession and ordination seen them [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and our guest is dr. Brian cross and I've interrupted you in the middle of your journey and you've just dealt with some of the awakenings besides becoming Anglican going deep in deeper in history in terms of liturgy and historical connection with early church fathers I mean the Anglicans are committed to unity of the church with the first ecumenical councils brain you know we're the rest of Protestantism might not make that so you're going back but your study of ordination and apostolic succession it's opening your heart to a bigger picture okay yeah I remember one conversation I had with the Anglican bishop in which I asked him how come why do we accept these councils and not these you know and I I was disappointed with his answer because it seemed to me not principled so it seemed kind of a bit arbitrary now I understand that there you know Anglican confessions you know and the thirty-nine articles and so on but the same attitude here's I'll tell you story from seminary so in seminary I took a class on the Westminster Confession of faith I mean and it's a preparation class for so at the end of the class toward the end of the semester we're supposed to list out all our exceptions exceptions we take to the confession and I had a few more than the others did at the time some people had more in something that less and it depended but I think this experience allowed me to see that the confession was not itself authoritative because you can just take exceptions to it and one of the fellow students I he saw my list of confessions exceptions and he said well why are you even here like why don't what do you meant by that why don't you study at a seminary that meets more where you're coming from right so you don't have to take so many exceptions any minute in a good way but the comments was eye-opening to me because I realized you know we're just we're interpreting Scripture and they were picking a confession matches Scripture and then we're identifying that confession as authoritative and I thought that's sort of self-deceptive no it's it's sort of it's not truthful the way it's not really authoritative a confession if we're just picking it because it matches their interpretation and so that was something that I realized then to some degree but it became more clear as it went on and I wanted to apply the same argument to this idea of picking councils and not all right you know what I mean so if we if we accept the fourth ecumenical council call so you know how can we don't accept the seventh I mean right is it because it doesn't match our interpretation well then who's really authoritative here not that councils let's just not pretend let's just go right back to the Bible one yeah you mentioned Westminster Confession I was very much Westminster confessional guy and my conservative Presbyterian Calvinism and it one thing struck me is that looking back on my own journey you know what was what was abandoned in the Reformation was the authority of bishops the authority to discern in union with Peter the meaning of the scripture all right they had the authority Sophia yeah okay the Westminster Confession basically says that the authority is Scripture but in the original languages so the people that had authority were the people who could interpret who could read the original languages so if you're a common Christian you want to know what the Bible say well you're going to those that can read the Greek in the Hebrew they were the authorities right so instead of bishops you have the scholars right I totally agree that shifts the locus of authority as we say right and I think this is one of those other aspects of the two paradigms I mentioned earlier in the seminary as a Presbyterian the way we approach questions of theology and doctrine was well let's do some exegesis right let's get out the extra Jetta chol tools and we can solve this problem that way and while I was in seminary I realized that exegesis alone doesn't do this it doesn't live up to this candor of being able to resolve these disputes interpreter for this beautifully well history testifies to that but you know there's another was not a Lutheran seminary in town Concordia and so we would occasionally talk with these fellows and they they know exegesis as well and they come to different interpretations so exegesis just wasn't enough I also saw because I was taking philosophy classes at the same time I saw I learned to see I came to see that philosophy or philosophical assumptions we're doing a lot of the interpretive work but we just didn't acknowledge that because we didn't see it so we were bringing assumptions to the text and then drawing an interpretation and treating that interpretation as authoritative but the work that's being done is by what we were bringing to the text philosophically and so long as we weren't identifying those assumptions they just kind of remained invisible and we didn't see oh that's what's really doing the interpretive work and so then seeing that was like oh my goodness I I want to be able to this is one of the reasons why I decided to study philosophy I want to not only identify the philosophical assumptions I'm bringing to Scripture but I wanted to make sure that they're good ones oh boy and you talk about being blind to the stuff you bring to not only the philosophies but if you're doing acts of Jesus and that idea that as a presbyterian okay I'm doing the acts of Jesus so I'm cutting through all these other ideas I'm doing the Exedy so I got the Greek I've got the Hebrew but obviously I'm not a perfect scholar I need helps so I bring over my bower art Gingrich or whatever that dictionary was so that I'm looking at that Greek word to know what it really means not what this this committee said but what that Greek well but I'm depending on this other authority right I'm depending on the guy that wrote that dictionary did he bring with it philosophical assumptions right so it's a long chain of assumptions that we brought with us that we're blind to right and even the the Alexa Kahn brings with it certain theological assumptions not just philosophical assumption so I have written a little article titled the tradition the lexicon how this is again two parts of the paradigm in that Protestant mindset I would go to the lexicon as the way of answering these kind of questions in exegesis and then in the Catholic paradigm you turn to tradition you know what are the Church Fathers teach about this right well then these two methods that the lexical method presupposes implicitly that the Church Fathers answer is not correct where do the lexicographers get their answers to these questions well they look at word usage at the same time period but it's not necessarily the word usage in the church it could be just general word usage right so there's a certain theological assumption there that what the church understood by that term or how that term developed by the guidance of the Holy Spirit that's not an authoritative way of taking that term understand that term rather we have to use scholarly methods and and that's theologically loaded that that's the distinction I realized at the time okay these are two different methods I'm hoping the audience is picking up on what you're saying in other words at the core there's a bit of an anti-catholic assumption as a thread through all that built right into the methodology right yeah yeah no I'm not denying the usefulness of looks lexicon doesn't turn to them right but I look at them in the context with the church father yeah all right so there you were in the midst of it yeah you know so this was still me as an Anglican okay and this was 2004 so when my friend said why aren't you Catholic and I threw myself into the church fathers probably more than men I should have being in grad school at the time all right sort of neglecting certain other things but by the time 2005 rolled around I was becoming more and more convinced let's put it this way I was having more difficult time finding reasons not to be Catholic and then in April 2005 pope john paul ii died and he was someone i respected not just as a as the pope but it has a philosopher too in fact i had used one of his text love and responsibilities in one of the classes I was teaching at the time so and I also had an experience earlier because he came to st. Louis in 1999 and spoke there and one of my teachers said I think that two extra tickets would like to go and has a Protestant ethic well sure so I got to go to the mass there as a Protestant and you know I think I feel kind of guilty about that because I'm sure there other Catholics who didn't get to go and hottest thing going to this but just being there you know in his presence and hearing him talk and seeing him now you know st. and then when he died I felt a kind of closeness to him it's hard to explain that but a deep gratitude for who he was what he had done even as a president I felt that and so I was contributed to the all the ceremonies and funeral constant coverage on television at the time and then I followed well Pope Benedict was elected and that was around April 20th and I remember April 22nd it was a Friday I was sitting in my Carroll at Saint Louis University and I had reached that final point where I had no further reason not to be Catholic and I realized I can't do this anymore the Catholic Church's the Church of Christ founded and I have to join her and so I I pulled back from my seat and I could sit up and I walked up the street to college Church Xavier and I walked into the back of the church and I was just looking for a pamphlet and how do we come catholic how do you become Catholic we in the back and that was as I was there I heard a voice said friends and friends voice he said Brian what are you doing here and I said well I'm trying to figure out how to become Catholic and he said he was a Catholic he said really he just gave me a bear hug and he sort of helped me out from there so that was the turning point for me but I'm I went home and told my wife that she will say that she cried she was not happy because she had a negative experience growing up in her neighborhood Catholics weren't a good example for her where she grew up and so she thought being Catholic meant losing your faith or not being faithful and so it took a little while for her we we started reading church fathers together we got to know some other Catholics who were solid people and and she realized that we all we both realized that to be a practicing Catholic it's not it's not enough just to go through the motions right there's a whole life of virtue that that's actually what it means to be Catholic right so the example that she had was a negative example but it wasn't necessitated by being Catholic and so that that helped out so then in 2006 we started going through RCIA 2005 by 2006 the Monsignor said I think you're writing and so we were received on October 8th 2006 all right talk about if you would but I got a lot of eggs I don't want to talk to you I don't have time you know but one of them is your wife's resistance and you've got a resistance to get over we live in a we live in a soup of anti-catholicism in America you talk about that a little bit did you experience that I mean it wasn't necessarily verbal anti-catholicism in your Pentecostal big background your pentacle Presbyterian or Anglican but but there's an assumption there I experienced it this way when I became Presbyterian there was very no pushback from relatives or friends or neighbors anybody when I became angle and there was no pushback at all but when I said I was becoming Catholic I immediately got pushback even on the day I was to be received I got a phone call from a relative you know I was just begging me not to do it and people started writing me and and just saying you know think twice about this and understand their concern but there's clearly a line that this was departing from you know the broader Protestant perspective yeah it's a part of our American heritage if you will and I want to talk to that about philosophy journey I mean there's this on one hand there's kind of this underlying anti-catholicism in our heritage there's a little bit of that about philosophy too in our culture especially in our in our non-christian tradition in America did you have a little bit of that too sure I think that the way that I was trying to get around that even as a Protestant was from Scripture you know so that we can avoid all those worldly philosophies you know philosophy was of the world it was a worldly thing and it's foolish in the eyes of God you know so this is wisdom and philosophy is foolish but I know I that's the way I can saw it as a Protestant but then as a Catholic well especially through Aquinas right Thomas I started to see that philosophy can be done well or can be done poorly and bad philosophy is very damaging and dangerous but good philosophy is really important and helpful and there's a line for Mayer styles in one of his fragments I believe he says you say you must not philosophize you philosophize you say you must philosophize you philosophize either way you philosophize in other words you can't avoid philosophy it's lots of fising you just we do it so the question is whether we're gonna do it well or poorly right that's the only question and so in our time I think at least in in the US and the West we tend to neglect philosophy and there's some some of that is on us I mean philosophers who've not done well with philosophy but we're very much of pragmatic people so we focus on getting things done right and so we focus on skills and technical areas which is good and then we we have theology on their side or Sunday morning and we have a difficult time integrating those two things so we tend to compartmentalize faith is over here and work is over here and skill and life and amusement and science and engineering and everything that's over here philosophy serves as a bridge between those two and so when philosophy drops out of the picture then that bridge is gone and you get that compartmentalization and if you study the early church fathers I mean oh you know this they recognize the role that philosophy played in preparing the the coming of Christ among the Greeks especially so Plato and Socrates and prepared the way for seeing beyond just the material world you know so the ancient pre-socratic fail ease and everything has made out of water and an XM anis everything's made at air so they're very much materialists whereas you get to Plato he sees that there's more to reality than just matter well that's already preparing the way for for Christ right in the early church fathers at what point I assume they did recognize that these early Greek philosophies were and was in fact the grace of God I mean at what point did they recognize us that really smart guys back there that it was the work of God in in the minds of these pre-christian you can see this already in the second century st. Justin Martyr talks about this Saint Clement of Alexandria and in the second century Origen talks about it Agustin talks about it now there was some controversy of how you know tertulia and what his drills I have to do with Athens so you know he was trying to push back a little bit but that's because he didn't want to allow for her he's trying to protect against pagan ization you know of Christianity but I think the idea of Providence again it going back to D ISM right the Church Fathers were we're not deists even about what took place before the coming of Christ right so all the things that took place among the pagans is I have kind of figures of Christ and figures of Mary in the well they saw those is God the Father are preparing for the coming of Christ these are the gold of the Egyptians as it were that the church thought they could take and and build on and use as a bridge even to to speaking to you know the pagans have Saint Paul did with the Athenians how do you help us audience and me make sure we're doing good philosophy if that's the problem doing bad philosophy well how do you I didn't make sure you're doing good philosophy well I great question is the big question because we can't all become professional officers right and it's a difficult subject it's it's one of the most difficult subject because it's not tangible right you know I think one thing here is to follow the church I mean this is a cyclical by Pope Saint John the paul ii fetus at rod co in which it's all about faith and philosophy i know its faith and reason in the title but he wrote that encyclical about philosophy that's what it's about and I think if we follow the church's guidance on philosophy that will help steers in the right direction that's what I'd say as a short answer you know my favorite scripture text which I if anyone's watching journey home you've heard me say this too many times I'm sorry it's proverbs 3:5 and 6 which you know way I've it may be a false guy but to me it's it is the some of the first steps for doing good philosophy trust and Lord with all your heart lean not on your own understanding in all your ways acknowledge him and he'll direct your paths right I mean that's a way of entering into good philosophy of trusting the Lord and that also means trusting in the church he gave us isn't and not leaning on my own understanding that's what we get ourselves in trouble philosophically right and even that line right there indicates that trying to do philosophy or think philosophically just by myself alone in that individualistic way that would be a way to go off track very easily so if I'm gonna be doing philosophy I want to be standing on the shoulders of all those who've come before me right so that's a kind of record it's a kind of humility right I'm going to approach philosophy by looking at what those who came before me have said and done and trying to build on it rather than just starting from scratch a big battle in philosophy I'm not a philosophical historian I wish I haven't knew more than that but was between the continuing platonic ideas I think augusta ms more than two and then aquinas which who was more aristotle talked about the importance of the church to make sure that we understand that we're getting this philosophy correct because even in these Great Father is Agustin and Aquinas we have a bit of a battle on how to apply the early Greek philosophies right so I would say what pope john paul ii says in fetus i rot so he uses the term perennial philosophy and so there's a broad perennial philosophy that's inside the church I call it the Catholic philosophical tradition so it's brought inside that broad tradition there are debates such as the one you just mentioned and that's fine there are debates but there's also debates that go beyond that so for example skepticism or nihilism that there's no purpose or meaning in life well that's outside the range of Catholic philosophical issue it engages it but that's if you've crossed that line to nihilism right well there's no meaning or purpose then you've left that philosophical tradition that's inside the church so there's in house debates and then there's those that are outside that tradition hopefully that distinction is helpful all right good our guest is dr. Brian cross just again as we as we get towards the close there were what would you and you'll look back you you had a conversion if you will into philosophy from your Pentecostalism and then later you had a conversion to liturgy which right I mean that was what that was and then of course our conversion to the authority of the church right what was the hardest barrier to get over for you or did you have a bunch of them but what would you say was the hardest to get over from this you the history you brought with you into the church I think I would say it's not just one thing but a whole package so seeing everything at like a paradigm as I mentioned earlier two paradigms once the paradigm picture falls into place then you can see oh my goodness it's a whole shift but if you don't see it that way if you if you take all the questions piecemeal one at a time then you can try to answer them by presupposing the paradigm you're already in which just begs the question so you have to be able to see both pictures both paradigms and then you can see all my goodness it all fits together over here yeah all right we have an email Ralph from Kansas City in my study of ecclesiology I haven't been able to convince myself of the need for a visible hierarchical church it just seems that wasn't what Jesus was intending when he was preaching the kingdom what are some of the reasons Catholics are so insistent on the visible nature of the church it appears more reasonable that the church is an invisible reality since we really can't know who is a true follower of Christ as opposed to someone who is only making an outward show of belief hmm well that's true about the judging the heart we can know somebody's heart so that's true but again how we know about the visibility the church is from the church father so the Christian faith is something received not constructed so we don't construct it according to how would I organize the church if I were in charge right that that would be a man-made way of approaching it kind of a consumeristic way of approaching it rather we receive it so how did Christ set up the church right well he set it up as a hierarchy with a hierarchical unity with apostles and with you know bishops and deacons and priests and so on and the reason for that in part was because we needed well we're visible were we ourselves are physical organisms right so we're not just ghosts or immaterial beings now there's an immaterial dimension to the church of course the Holy Spirit is the soul of the church but take for example doctrine well how are we going to resolve these doctrinal disputes well we need some kind of visible hierarchical organ that can do that what about discipline how we're going to do with that well that's not something that an invisible church can do right so questions of doctrine and discipline they demand a visible church it seems to me that as you mentioned earlier if you have a kind of a deistic view of the church whether you call it that or not in other words you believe that okay Christ started something but he didn't establish anything physical you eventually end up with a gnostic view of spirituality in other words we ourselves it's our spirits are trapped in this body of our I completely agree with that Marcus I think that one of the reasons why in today's time we seek a lot of confusion about who we are as human persons just in our culture around us right that there's the idea of what's called expressive individualism where I just decide what I'm going to be and I think of my body as the car that I Drive and I can just do whatever I want with it so it's a failure to recognize that this body is part of me it's part of my identity that I am an embodied being that's who I am that's how I'm created so we're all created well if we take that same ecclesiology that's disembodied in gnostic as you say no wonder we have this difficulty we can't confront this philosophical mistake about who we are and at the same time endorse a disembodied ecclesiology yep and just as I am an embodied soul and I'm not very perfect well the church is a bunch of embodied Souls I mean there we are we are perfect all in need of group it's right grace and and forgiveness and humility you know which is in my view probably the most important characteristic of good philosopher needs right well this is right how Socrates begins I know that I don't know what 40 seconds to go your website called to communion com tell the audience about that well this is something that a group of us set up people who converted mostly from the reformed tradition back in on Ash Wednesday of 2009 we started called to communion so it's been around for a while when the goal was to create a forum in which we could have dialogue to resolve these disagreements how can we move forward in a positive way in an environment that was charitable and gracious and not hostile and you know you know that kind of setting so it's it requires a commitment to charity mutual charity into pursuing the truth in love and celebrating what we share our baptism our love for Christ raptures but not going to indifferent ism words I doesn't matter exactly that middle path right there yeah dr. cross what a great great great pleasure you might have you on the program and encourage the audience to go to your website and called the communion dot-com to connect with you and hear what other things you're saying in your blog's and discussions thank you thank you very much and God bless you in your and you work as a professor in philosophy thank you thank you and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I do pray the doctor crosses journey is an encouragement to you my friend god bless you see you next week [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

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Keywords: JHT, JHT01582

Id: RWEh2-qbBuk

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2017