Journey Home - 2019-02-05 - Ken Hensley And Dr. David Anders

[Music] [Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program tonight's episode is a special edition of the journey home it's one of we haven't done a round table in a while but we I had two reasons for thinking about doing this this evening one I had some friends in the studio Ken Hensley is a former Baptist minister former guest on the journey home and dr. David Anders former Presbyterian both guests on the journey home guys welcome to the jury Marcus thank you so much good to have you back great pleasure but the other reason that I thought well gotcha here but also recently we had heard that we're anticipating the canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman this body your way this fall this winter and I thought we'd use that as an excuse to talk a little bit about history in our journeys I'm sure for the upcoming year there's gonna be lots of EWTN programs on Newman and his effect on the church and and such but I thought we'd kick it off not so much a discussion about Newman but about the place of history and we're basing that idea on a statement that Newman himself made which we've said many times in the journey home in the introduction to his passing on the development of Christian doctrine he says to be deep in history as deceased to be Protestant so before we get into that specific discussion now let's just remind the audience of our journeys so they know where we're coming from I begin with you Ken if we would really quickly and just for you those of you at home large our full journeys are all on the journey home website so coming on Network CH network.org as well as EWTN s website of course but a quick summary ok I'll attempt that I'll attempt that radical conversion to to Jesus Christ at the age of 22 basically just reading the New Testament and reading some apologetics works by CS Lewis Josh McDowell some of the others I came to faith in Christ in a totally non-denominational evangelical environment three and a half years later I was married my wife and I went I went away to Bible College where I've got my undergraduate degree in Bible and theology and then went to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena California received my master's degree there I was intending to go on in an academic kind of path but I was invited to come on a staff at a church as an associate pastor and I thought I'd take a break from academics and wound up never getting back to it so I was or I have became a youth pastor in a Baptist Church three and a half years later I was ordained into the American Baptist denomination on the West Coast California and became the senior pastor of a church and I was a senior pastor for 11 years so I was pretty much I guess Baptist in my theology you know non-denominational evangelical they're all Baptist it's all sort of the same thing on the Calvinistic side so I guess Reformed Baptist in my theology really and then am I talking about conversion too I guess just a warrior coming to the church well what happened was I I found out out of the blue that Scott Hahn had become a Catholic and Scott Hahn is someone that I had known about a decade before and I knew that he was not a Catholic you know in any way I was just pastoring my church when a guy at church comes up to me one evening and just drops his bomb on me that he has a set of tapes by someone named Scott Hahn and I took the tapes went home I listened to his conversion story and I had never thought about becoming Catholic and when I heard his story it was just a curiosity welled up in me to know more really to do basically the question I had was you know how could I have gone this far in my in my learning and not know the case for the Catholic faith and here's someone that I had respected when I knew him so when I knew was very bright making the case and so I'm short version as I tracked Scott down the very next day and I began to talk to him and I began to read study thus began about four years of rethinking my entire Christian worldview from the ground floor up and in 1996 in September I resigned my ministry to enter the Catholic Church my wife and I were brought in Easter Vigil of 1997 John Henry Newman had a lot to do with Muhammad place in my conversion and we'll come back to that a little later thanks Kent sure appreciate dr. Anders Marcus thank you so I also raised Protestant evangelical Presbyterian not Baptist I had a deep antipathy towards things Catholic did not regard the Catholic Church as an option at all saw Catholics as objects of conversion so when I went through my path of study seminary and graduate school I thought I could do no better in my Christian formation than to study the guys that I thought were the Fathers of the Church Martin Luther and John Calvin really the founders of the Protestant movement and in particular studying their reasons for rejecting the Catholic faith and I really tried to rethink their polemic against Catholicism after them and I spent a great deal of time many years of my life as a PhD student studying the world of late medieval Catholicism 15th century 16th century Catholicism understand what they were reacting against what they borrowed from Catholicism really get my head wrapped around in that pivotal period of history and the end result of that was that I discerned that I was in the wrong church that the Catholics had the better side of the argument history was integral to my conversion that it's several levels one of them was at the level of the Reformation itself I grew up in Evin Jellicle Protestant that's a very revival istic tradition then if you know the tradition you know it was a lot of its roots to the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries and there's a kind of an expression of Christian spirituality and a faith that I found remarkably absent from the writings of the Reformers the whole sort of invite Jesus into your heart pray to receive Christ conversion istic account of Christian life is something that came into the Protestant world really in the 19th century you know find it in the 16th or even 17th or 18th centuries and there were other there were similar things but I realized you know the what I've always taken to be the gospel I can't find in the men that my church recognizes as its own founders and that shook my confidence in the notion that structure alone was a sound basis of handing down the deposit of faith Protestantism also is a tradition that is committed to the doctrine of primitivism the idea that we should go back to Christian antiquity to find a model for Christian life and Luther viewed himself that way Calvin saw themselves as men that we're going back to antiquity to the refashioned Christian life on an antique model so I assumed that vision was truth and when I went to study Christian antiquity I found a very Catholic expression of faith and so that that view of Christian history fell apart for me but I also learned that the idea of primitivism where do you even get this idea does the New Testament tell us that we should regard the New Testament as an ideal form of Christian life I think it's beat hard to make that case given that most of the letters of the New Testament were written to churches in crisis I studied more and I found out you know where the idea of primitivism comes from it's a Catholic idea it ultimately traced back to the monastic movement the cluniac reforms of the high middle ages those monastic houses that wanted to reformulate their own lives according to a primitive monastic rule that in turn gets translated into the papacy of Gregory the seventh and so the whole idea of let's reform the church and go back to a pristine model was circulated in Catholicism 500 years before Luther ever thought of picking it up and there's one thing after another began to unweave my conception of the world the Christian faith the Bible the whole course of Christian history began to unravel in front of me and it led to a deep crisis in my own life and it was only when I finally tried on the idea of becoming Catholic that the crisis could resolve and I could see my way clear to to an intellectually fulfilled Christian life but it was either a Catholic or nothing Neumann of course was a significant figure I mean along with so many other great Catholic theologians but Newman helped me in a number of ways one of them his his idea of the development of doctrine I was a historian of Christian doctrine my field of study was the history of Christian doctrine so Newman's ideas made immediate sense to me it was a much more sensible way of construing Christian history the Protestant way was pristine purity fall recovery Newman's you was a progressive development of doctrine that was a much more sensible way of construing the data there are also specific doctrines that Newman helped me with in particular devotion to the Blessed Mother Newman showed how how ancient Catholic Mary and dogma is in the church and he did an interesting thing for me in his essays on Mary he points out not always as an ancient doctrine but he shows the catholicity of the doctrine meaning that you can find it in Egypt you can find it in North Africa you can find it in the southern Europe and Italy and the Holy Lands and and in the Eastern countries there is widespread across the ancient Christian world not just ancient but but Catholic and that introduced me to a way of thinking about evaluating theological questions not only their biblical basis or antiquity but their catholicity his thinking is is Catholic in the fullest sense of the word through and through and I found it such a intellectually illuminating way to look at the data and so there are many other ways in which Newman helped me he's just a profound individual of course and I was happy to follow him into the church thank you to you and appreciate normally when I did a roundtable I'd have three guests and then I just sit back as the host but since I'm the third let me give a little summary of my journey and like yours mine's on that on the website although the thing that gets harder and harder for me as I try to remember my journey is that I here are so many journeys after why I wonder was that my judgment that there you know and I'm always as I hope the audience is so moved by the stories because it reminds me that really the bottom line is it was only by the miracle of grace that any of this logic or this history or scripture was opened into my mind it wasn't my own intellect I if I were to summarize my journey as I looked back maybe the most important thing had to do not as a scholar but as a pastor feeling it's very eternally responsible for what I delivered to my people on a Sunday morning and if I look back a lot why I became Catholic that was the spark because I recognize I'm not a great intellect but I recognized that this word is the infallible Word of God and so I saw it as the foundation for all truth and so I got into the pulpit on a Sunday morning my responsibility the reason I was there was because of this word not because of an ordination but because of this word and so my responsibility was to deliver this word to the people because I felt their salvation depended on it not on my preaching but on the word and I say that what the Lord used to awaken that besides getting in contact with my old the seminary buddies got on was the recognition that on any given Sunday within a 50-mile radius of my pulpit there was 15 to 20 other pulpits the men just like me that loved Jesus Christ and felt that the Bible was the sole foundation of our faith but we taught such radically different things oh yes from issues of theology doctrine morals but I think what struck me more and more was the issue of salvation itself how we understood what is necessary for salvation I had my view Methodist said his view the Baptist Assembly of God Church of Christ Lutheran Episcopalian those Catholics way over there and that was the stone in my shoe that eventually opened my heart first timothy 3:15 the pillar and ball work of the truth is the chart of church and that was the spark that eventually it was newman in the end besides so many wonderful witnesses like Scott Hahn and so many others in his many books it was Newman is si is his biography yeah was forget hood so it's said apologia propempo Javita sua Roby de su which is red and gray yes classes convinced me I could no longer be a Protestant mm-hmm and but I wasn't quite ready to become Catholic he was asking a development of doctrine that sealed the journey for me because one of the points he makes in there is that the the acceptance of the authority of the papacy was accepted before the Trinity was defined and the divinity of Christ even the Canon of Scripture we already see evidence of the development of the authority of the bishops I mean that was the issue that brought me I relate so much to what you're saying because the issue of authority now then this is somewhere along in those four years of study but but I would start in Anabaptist environment congregational form of government there's literally no one above me there was no one and I remember thinking at a certain point you know I'm going into my office because I preached expository through books of the Bible and so I'd pull down this great scholar who happens to be reformed scholars I got this Lutheran guy over here got an Anglican guy got a Nazarene got a Baptist and I synthesized what they're saying I bring it together and I walk up in the pulpit and I tell the people what I think the Bible of teaching and just this realization coming over me slowly that there was no one above me that it was just me it was this me teaching and and I knew my congregation would basically buy it because I studied more than they did and you know and yet right up the street but as you said there's someone contradicting me there's another one anyway plus the books in your library were self chosen yeah and often the books we choose the ones we like well three with others or they contradict do we know yeah you know there we've been talking a lot about the issue of how do you know what's true is it through the Bible alone or as is Christian history of witness and the teaching of the church and a tradition but then there's the actual content of the deposit that's delivered by the tradition and for me there was also an appeal in history because what the Catholic Church taught was objectively more beautiful answered more deeply the questions of my own human heart and no one spoke to me more powerfully I already talked about a Gustin being a witness to the Catholic faith in antiquity but what he actually said about God in the moral life and spirituality resonated so deeply in my heart and answered deep existential questions deep longing you know one of the things that kept Agustin from being a Catholic for a long time was that can his really understanding of the relationship of faith to reason he thought he thought that you couldn't be a Catholic you couldn't be a Christian and hold to the teaching of Natural Science because he thought that natural science had contradicted the doctrines of Justice do you think that's a new problem that's a very ancient and being deep in history helps us see that I sure I remember us as a Protestant and I'm gonna ask you this question in a moment but this idea of you know how important history was to us and the joke was often that a great variety a great percentage of non Catholic Christians kind of know history from the Apostles to Luther and not enough in between but I remember in my own journey begging to differ with that because the danger is that if we didn't know that history we would read back our presumptions into that history so in other words where did the deposit of our faith come from did our Lord give the Apostles a deposit of faith that therefore was protected and preserved and then became more verbal and visible as the time needed or did he just basically say okay guys I'm going to heaven just kind of run with it you know and there are many evangelicals I believe that that really it's was a free-for-all and the Johannah and the Petra and the different little communities meant develop their own things and it evolved into what we have so this idea of history was as I look back was important now if you go back the two of you oh maybe I'll start with you David where was history important to you in your pre Catholic days as a Christian oh sure the reason I elected to study history is I wanted to know where I came from and I recognized myself as a historical being the meaning of my life is framed by a narrative as everyone says and I wanted to be able to see where my narrative my personal narrative fell in relationship to my forefathers was that normal in your particular tradition I don't know that it was I mean I had never heard that the gospel preached to me in historical terms like that other than simply to make the claim that Luther and Calvin had recovered antiquity I don't know that there was a particularly historical angle to the to the faith it just was something that spoke to me in my heart and so I went into it realizing fight if I can know the history I'll be able to know better Who I am did in your particular tradition dr. Andrews did you have kind of a knee-jerk answer to why there was this big jump from the Apostles to Luther I mean in terms of a historical quote understanding of the early days in the church well sure I mean there's a standard answer to that question within Protestant polemics and the standard answer is that the papacy buried the gospel under a lot of superstitious smoke largely in an exercise of self aggrandizement that the ambition of the of the popes of rome had smothered the gospel under a host of manmade traditions there are a lot of reasons while that view of history is false but one of them is that it's evident if you look around the ancient Christian world not everybody recognized the authority of the Pope in antiquity and even those who did sometimes were removed from him geographically such that the Pope couldn't exercise an effective jurisdiction over churches in far-flung corners of the Empire except you know maybe by a correspondence that could take centuries to play out so if the Reformers thesis was true if Catholic tradition is really kind of the aggression of the Roman hierarchy to suppress the gospel we should expect to find in communities remote from the Pope something that looks like Lutheranism right if if Protestantism naturally flows forth from the pages of Scripture we should find Protestantism flourishing wherever there's an absence of Catholicism mm-hmm and in fact what you find is something very different if you go look in ancient Persia or southern India or or Ethiopia Eric Egypt North Africa well North Africa was was Roman but these Arabia these places in the world that we're remote from direct Roman influence you find nothing remotely similar to Lutheranism nothing remotely similar to Calvinism and it puts the lie to this Calvinist thesis that the Protestant religion just sort of spontaneously emerges out of the Bible no Protestantism emerged in a very specific time in place Saxony Europe Northern Europe in the early 16th century for reasons that were highly particular and very very related to that social context it's not the natural outgrowth of the Bible is a natural outgrowth of that particularly historical era it's interesting we look at that statement by Newman to be deep in history as it seems to be Protestant it it's almost as if it's just not history that awakens us to the fullness but our ability to travel and to know these other cultures because at different times you a person can live their whole life and have no clue what's going on in Ethiopia or India or different parts of the world but as we begin to see their history you get this visit a church in Ethiopia we see that it ain't Lutheran that's not Lutheran it ain't Lutheran it's our ability to see that is also another way of helping us being open to this history now you were a former Presbyterian background well there was this big Baptist long the secret history of the gospel right did you yeah yeah I didn't really have I didn't really have that in my arsenal it was more what what um what dr. Andrews just said it was that view of the early church but the thing that cracks me up really about Newman is his statement to be deep in history as deceased to be Protestant because when I when I think about it I thought I was deep in history because most of the evangelicals around me only read contemporary theologians who are you read you thought you were getting deep if you went back to d/l moody or something like that yeah yeah and I had begun to read Jonathan Edwards and I began to read the Puritans and so I was reading oh and john bunyan that they're all named john I don't know why you'd tell me but extra moves but I was reading the Puritans because I went to work for a bookstore that kind of specialized in the works of the Puritans it was a Calvinist bookstore and so I was reading the Puritans and then going back all the way back I mean all the way back to - Luther himself and I was reading Luther and I was reading Calvin and so compared to the people that I knew I thought I was mr. deep in history totally and that's why it it really hit me when I first read Newman and he said to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant and then he then he went on a little little stronger he said it's easy to show that the early church was not Protestant and then in another place that I can almost paraphrase I love the passage don't know what pages on but he says if such a system of doctrine as Protestants believed existed in the early church it has been clean swept away from the pages of history as if by a flood by a deluge is gone you know and I remember reading those things and just thinking this guy is throwing down the gauntlet totally and the answer that was typical the answer that could be given as well then obviously since Jesus and the apostles were basically Baptists or Lutheran's were Presbyterians isn't like that and the early churches were obviously Baptist churches or Presbyterian churches or nazma or something something very much like it the only reason you can't find them in history is because the Catholic Church has they you know the victor writes the history and and we wrote them out of history but what I found one going back is that that didn't make any sense because there are plenty of heretical groups that that we know from early history we know about the Marcy nights we know about the EBI nights we know about a lot of sex and so it's not like the Catholic Church wrote them out of history and pretend like they never existed we know them the Montanez so many others but still no you can't find a Lutheran Church you can't find a Baptist Church and I still remember searching history in some depth and the day that I came home and I said to my wife you know is what my famous little statement I said honey I've been crawling around in the early church for a long time now I had looked under every rock I look behind every tree and I said honey there is not a Baptist in sight none and and so so Newman's challenge was was very important to me and the only thing I can say I mean I look I look back on it now and I think why didn't I care about the early church why didn't I care about the history between you know the starting with the post-apostolic period and I end up to Lutheran Calvin and is this what David said I just kind of knew that Catholicism was crazy you know um and yeah you know the Pope's you know had just overlaid it with all this kind of magic and all this kind of weird stuff so it was something I really didn't have to pay attention to I really thought that well I thought I was deep in history to the fact I loved reading history when I was a evangelical I had my particular seminary we had strong history classes in fact when I graduate from seminary and was ordained at first a Congregationalist before I was president Irian when the first courses adult courses I taught at the local church was a course in church history I thought I was deep in history but the issue is that the lens through which I looked at history ignored the Episcopal government ignored the aspects I looked at it from the Tourette's view as a whole missions a history of missions and different missionaries going out in the proclaiming of the gospel and how it was sometimes squelched by bad so in other words I thought I was deep in history but I was I was deep in a truncated view of history I could have named Assisi Francis of Assisi at different popes and different people but I had a slant on everything I mean was that a part of what did you do with the with the sacramental you know the evidence of the sacramental nature of the church early on baptism you well you could study history and not talk about that stuff or you can just kind of assume that that's part of the church kind of sliding toward this magical direct and just sort ignore it again the issue was the proclamation of the gospel going and make disciples of all nations all these great witnesses may be burdened as Christian was in button pilgrims progress with this Catholicism that he couldn't break free but yet by God's grace the gospel came through into Germany and into Ireland and the England with a Gustin and all these different things I mean so there was that great history of seeing that but in the process we're kind of missing the church and I'm missing a significant but now you were a historian so you knew more about this what did you think of the sacramental view nature of baptism or the Eucharist in the early church and I first started studying church history in earnest when I was in seminary from men who knew the history very well but they presented a kind of parody of the Catholic tradition I mean they they they put the elements of the faith in front of us but then mocked them yeah and it was like well you know those Catholics they were kind of crazy you know they were working with dead bones all the time and you have to kind of it was very much a let's dismiss that they will will find those brief poignant moments where some sort of clarity shines through that's very much the way Calvin himself handled it he he would have said that the faith had continued but it was kind of limping along you know and that and that people have a had a sort of wounded conception of the gospel and they were clinging on to the Creed and maybe to baptism amidst all these bear shadows and and how do you know which the Trinity or a different doctrine is true and what I was taught it was the quasi unanimous acceptance of people in all places at all times of a particular ID electorate Arianism so basically was a democratic vote that passed down through the ages well if the Holy Spirit yeah if truth is found by the consensus of Christian people down through the era then we must certainly throw out Lutheranism because if there's one thing that's evident in the ancient church no one in the ancient church there was a they may have disagreed about the Trinity which they did in fact we had debates about the Trinity about the to date receive Christ about all kinds of issues one thing that no one in antic disputed no one disputed that we are saved through the renovation of our moral life I don't care where you were on the Christian spectrum in what heretical group everybody believed that you had to have your interior life renovated morally in order to be saved why don't we pause there guys and we'll take a break and I would like to suggest that you viewers visit deep in history calm to view many talks on history that are at the coming home Network website as well as maybe some specific questions you might have about the place of history in our faith let's take a break we'll come back [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and I'm joined today by two good friends Kenneth Hensley former Baptist minister and dr. David Anders former Presbyterian and we're just talking about history kind of inspired by a giant Incarnate Newman who as I mentioned it's anticipated that he'll be declared a saint this about a year from now we talked about history and kind of dovetailing on Newman's statement about to be deep in history as it ceased to be Protestant he talked about history and your former journey what part did it play specifically in awakening you to the Catholic Church it kind of hinted at at the two of you but if you go back to it was their turning moment that history particularly played in that they would go do you Ken well well I mentioned Newman & Newman was a big one John Henry Newman was very very important to me the challenge that he threw down that led me to begin reading the early fathers and my decision at that point was because I had taken church history also it fuller seminary and I'd even taken church history and undergraduate studies and so I thought did I not read it and the truth was I I hadn't read it I had received kind of a condensation from my professor and as David said a moment ago they they tend to present the Catholic view and then kind of make fun of it or something like that so I went back and began to read the the early church fathers in as in chronological order as best we know and began to read them straight through to get a real sense of the flavor the feeling the atmosphere that the smell you know the taste of it and and I came away thinking Newman is right these are not Protestant churches they're not evangelical Baptist Church they're nothing like that but but let me jump to one other that's important to me and that kind of dovetails was something that David just said to I read I'm I picked up a copy of Alister McGrath two-volume work yes did see a day the Justice of God a two-volume history of the doctrine of justification and Alister McGrath is a very very well known Protestant an Oxford theologian a professor and very well-respected and I read his book and he talked about the the period of time before Augustine first of all and he says in the earliest centuries of the church you don't find a develop a developed doctrine of justification at all what you really finders paraphrases of statements from the New Testament just descriptions lifting the the very verbiage of the New Testament he says when you come to a Gustin that you have the first serious formalization and when you do salvation is conceived justification is conceived as including the renovation of the interior person you know actually becoming holy and then he goes on I'm stepping through it quickly he goes through a Gustin then he goes through the period from agustin to the Reformation and he says there's no change it's a it's the Catholic doctrine of salvation in a nutshell justification all the way through to Luther and then when he describes Luther's position he makes statements like these he says Luther who made this radical distinction between justification and sanctification he says he made this distinction and no one had made the distinction before he says no one had even conceived ever in the history of the Christian of Christian theology of the distinction that Luther was making there and he goes on to call Luther's point of view eh what does it feel like late theological nobama yeah theological novum a brand-new idea in the history of theology and I remember that being an important point to me qualify one thing that McGrath says McGrath makes the point that prior to Agustin there's no really developed doctrine of justification yeah Church and that's true that doesn't mean there wasn't a developed doctrine of salvation and this is something that the Lutheran scholar Krister Stendhal brings out in his work on Paul in Palestinian Judaism or Poland Paul in the Jews there was a very well articulated doctrine of salvation just not in the terms that Paul gives us in Romans in Galatians it was other Paul line text and other mythical texts that framed it we find it in Irenaeus all the way back in the second century who says that we regain in Christ what we lost in Adam I need to be made to me image of God and Saint st. Athanasius the great says that God became man that men might become gone it's so the idea of of a mystical renovation of the human person after the likeness of image of Jesus through the sacraments in which we died with him in Baptism and are raised again with him to new life and then the whole legal and sacramental framework of the church presupposes the life of grace and moral innervation that's what the disciplinary structure was there to enforce that if you fall away from the practice of morality you would be excommunicated and have to do lengthy penance in order to come back again so that whole phrase that I say every one of those words but I just don't want to take the time so they're all very explicit in the tradition so as I said there wasn't a dollar just what Justin did prior to Agustin people read st. Paul as if he was talking about what he actually said he was talking about what was talking about in those texts how are Jews and Gentiles to get along right and how should Gentiles relate to the Mosaic law and so prior to agustin Christians who were Gentiles by birth picked up and go oh well we got that one figured out we don't have to follow Mosaic law okay next and so they didn't really exegete Paul for a unique doctrine of salvation and Augustine's contribution and to some extent maybe a deformation a little bit was to read the doctrine of justification as if it were a catch-all for the doctrine of salvation and so he imports a theological sense to that word that may have a sort of a wider valence than Paul himself intended and McGrath draws that out yeah he does he admits that he admits that and and you know when I read a Gustin and I found that he was a Catholic and it scared the pants off of me I said I'll read deeper into the tradition and see if maybe it gets better when I go earlier but what I found were a set of controversies not about justification but about morality and salvation that were so much more frightening to me and the biggest was the doctrine of the second repentance do you remember that from the second century another question and we find it in the Shepherd of Hamas we find it in clement of alexandria we find it in turtle ian the question is and and Justin Martyr alludes to it can a baptized Christian sin and expect to stay within the church and there was a strong presumption by many that know that know that that once you were baptized you might get one shot but there was an expectation of a serious change of life and Tertullian this church church not church father nekoma father but early Christian writer Tertullian ultimately left the church because the Pope said you know what Jesus said seventy times seven we're gonna forgive you even if you're an adulterer or a murder and the Tertullian couldn't handle that so he split but again the presumption was that reconciliation with the church is a juridical act that the Pope and the bishops have the authority given them by Christ to absolve your sin and readmit you to fellowship but the principle of fellowship was a renovated moral life and charity you had to live a holy life in order to commune that's why viatical reception of Holy Communion is so important because it's the bond of my visible unity with the church and those that were outside the church through penance had to be reconciled to Holy Communion before they died there's an example of of the data from history clarifying even Agustin absolutely glowing the data before Agustin to clarify but what you struck me with what both of you said but it's this idea of being new with Luther when did that hit you like wait what do you mean love what new yes yes yeah I mean of course Luther believed that he was going back to Paul and Paul's original meeting but McGrath says no assembly hearing that no one in the history of Christian thought had formulated that yo well yeah it was very striking so this was a wake yeah for you now Newman himself and I wondered again if this connected with you either of your parts where he as he went back in history and particularly studied the fourth the Arian controversy in the fourth century that as he studying that still in the back of his mind trying to envision anglicanism as a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism to the essay but still even as doing the Arian that he's confronted with something he didn't anticipate which which was when he looked at the controversies it awakened him to to his start of the journey even if you want to talk about that that point that's saying that what was it that that Newman Newman recognized that there were combatants in theological controversy in antiquity who claimed for themselves the mantle of antiquity they claimed to have the original gospel what they lacked was the note of catholicity that there would be a sect set apart from the majority of the Christian world around the around the globe and it was a Gustin who formulated the objection for him dealing with the Donatists of the fourth century securest unicode or poster arm the verdict of the whole world is conclusive Agustin said to the Donatists you can't be the Catholic Church because you're just in North Africa hmm and Newman saw that and recognized that an incident I can't lay claim to catholicity because I'm just in England that's where Newman I think he says that he looked in the mirror and realized I'm the heretic I'm up yes yeah and as I remember reading that for myself which was a stepping stone in my own journey toward the church in history is that he realized that from a sola scriptura standpoint in all those different arguments he would have ended up on the wrong side right of the Art Show Sola scriptura was the point that's why you have Arianism because it was a it was breaking from the church and a private interpretation of Scripture was the background of all those early heresies and so it's like whoa unless you study history you don't realize not only that if you went back going on Scripture alone I might be on the wrong side but that there are people today practicing the same heresies that were declared heresies years ago but they're not aware of it and then you're reading along and I'm reading st. Vincent of Loren and his kumano tour iam and there's that fantastic passage where he says if the heretics says to you I can remember outset but he says why should I or if it if you I can remember who asked sue but it's why should I abandon the universal tradition of the church he says The Heretic has a ready answer he goes because it is written he goes immediately he will scamper through the entire Bible the Old Testament the New Testament quoting passage after passage after passage and of course st. Vincent piles it up and it is a really humorous way he says he says there's hardly a passage in Scripture that he won't allude to and stack up as a gigantic passage of Scripture to prove his point of view and yet it's a point of view that isn't held by the church and hasn't been held by the church and you know all all those passages hit me because I realized that that's me that's me for both of you another point I'm member that what history awakened for me was that unlike either view I was not a great scholar I read the Institute's of Calvin and I read much of Luther and I was in seminary but I wasn't a scholar on however what history awakened me to was the proof texting oh yes yeah would you think you're talking about that I mean that's what history awakens you to is that you may have got a little bit Gustin but you didn't get a Gustin mm-hmm yeah well go ahead well it's it's the polemical use of Texas is what it is and and all of us are prone to do this because we have a deep confirmation bias we want to look for data that will confirm us in our prejudices because we don't like to be unsettled and we don't like to be threatened and this has been documented even in in social psychology today in laboratories out even outside the realm of religion whether you're talking religion politics or whatever people don't like to be proved wrong and they're very selective in their use of data and I'm you know I mean I'm guilty of this too right and that's one of the reasons you have to dive in with both feet and and and immerse yourself in really the the spirit and flow as you tried to do right if you want to read your way through the father's and really get the the measure of the thing and and when you do you begin to realize that the things that motivated Agustin in particular we're not the questions that motivated Luther christened all his book on st. Augustine and the interest but introspected conscience of the West is what brought that out to me most clearly Luther was motivated by his unfactored his his neurotic fear of sin and guilt and damnation and he takes that as a lens that he imposes on the entire tradition makes that the normative framework for thinking about Christian life all you have to do is read widely enough you know that all Christians have a consciousness of sin but not like Luther dead you know not like Luther did and they're animated by a whole different set of questions and all the Church Fathers were you just don't find that kind of tormented Lutheran conscience anywhere in antiquity and you can yes you can exercise you know text here or there and and bend them to suit your political purposes but you that it's false to any any claim to continuity with antiquity III never realized until I read the early church fathers and in a continuous sense like that's supposed to pick and choose I had been given seminary the early belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist I mean that was such an awakening was that also a big part in your journey has seen the reality cut the continuous voice in belief all the way from the beginning all the way through yeah another book that was important to me was written by an Anglican scholar historian J&D Kelly his book early Christian doctrines and to to watch him pile up the evidence from the early fathers of a of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist to believe and how universal it was and and on baptism as well that he comes to a summary statement where he just says flat-out he says the the teaching of the early church definitely was that in baptism original sin is washed away the gift of the Holy Spirit is given you know regeneration occurs and heat estate sees as though they're facts and another historian that I read was some Yaroslav Pelican mm-hmm and he he did the same thing you know he assesses all the information and he basically lays out this conclusion that you can't avoid the fact that this was the teaching of the church and in fact if I remember right I don't think that the doctrine of the you can correct me I know you know more I don't think the doctrine of the real presence was seriously questioned until grad Bertus and rat dramatists in like what the 9th or 10th century or something now nine centuries has a long time and and so you know another thought that came to my mind was you know if if if our Lord and if the Apostles did not teach the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist how could the church go astray as quickly as it did because all the way back it's teaching it I mean you can't find a place where it's not teaching it how do they go astray so quickly how does it Church goes astray so universally and why isn't there anyone complaining about it why isn't there a controversy at least I mean the closest thing you can find to a controversy is there that one statement and st. Ignatius of Antioch where he speaks of those who deny that Christ is present in the Eucharist what's that passage again you know he says there are some who say they also deny that Christ has no body yeah yeah and they're perishing in there you know so your initiatives yep so there's someone saying it but but my point is I would think that you at least find a movement somewhere I mean you know one of the Apostles are their successors standing up and saying hold on hold on this is not what we taught and so to see the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist taught so universally taught so quickly taught everywhere and not even disputed until read Burgess and rat Ram has come along about a thousand years later I mean that was and if it was all a powerful evidence especially when you know that you're operating on a pick and choose me and my Bible you know basis I yeah if it was wrong all those years then where was the Holy Spirit administered this and our Lord promised would lead his people into truth yeah and you read the Reformers or you read their descendants and it's the Bible is clear number one and if you just pray and the Holy Spirit will lead you to the truth and I knew well enough you know as you mentioned a while ago I knew well enough that there were pastors all over the area that were smarter than I was who undoubtedly prayed more than I do in and sought the leading of the Holy Spirit more than me and came to contrary conclusions to those that I came to that I remember this image coming into my mind at a certain point where I thought you know what if I could parachute back and I just you know you just dropped Ken Hensley in the third century or the fourth century and I look around and the church believes in these things these Catholic doctrines you know and I I thought would you say to them we would you have the gall to say you're all wrong because I'm really smart and I studied my Bible really hard you're all wrong and I'm so I'm gonna start this new church called the Ken Hensley church I mean would I do that it's like Montaine iya slee seemed to me like that that would have to be the height of arrogance that the only humble position you could possibly take would be to take your seat in this church with Agustin with Cyprian Ambrose and with the others you know I remember in those early days the seminary and pastor it that there was there was somebody out there in the news called a Jim Jones yeah who started out fine as a I think a Methodist pastor or maybe whose Baptist I can't remember but eventually he was calling himself God he's friend taking his people out of California yeah then do place Rica all gave him kool-aid so I mean how do you make sure that you're not misguided and that you're your and the person you following is trustworthy that's one of the issues I remember that this coming home to me and it's this thing about history in a stunning way when my my my wife I I gave my wife who wasn't interested in Catholicism I gave her a job of typing up all these potations from the early church fathers for me and she was typing with all this stuff on baptism you know and and so she was absorbing it and we're sitting in church one Sunday night and some conversations started about baptism after the evening service and and my wife who doesn't usually join in and those kinds of conversations she she pipes up and she says well a Polycarp said and she starts the paraphrasing son and my associate pastor said Oh Polycarp can go fish ha ha and I feel like there was something it's like another gear turned in me where I thought and and I could see a gear turning on my wife's head you know just sort of like he doesn't even care Polycarp knew st. John I know he doesn't care what Polycarp yeah so those are the beautiful things of becoming deep in history is this idea that Polycarp nude st. John who our Lord choosing the Apostles and those apostles had their own disciples and those we have these letters from you know and yet polystar can go fish because i just go straight to the bible and it's you know we keep talking about how we know the truth of christ but even after i became persuaded that Protestantism was not historical and the catholic church was there was the added benefit that the truth I found in the Catholic Church was salutary mm-hmm and it answered questions in my life that my product doesn't did not answer and it solved problems for me that I couldn't get solved in Protestantism and it changed my life and way man I Protestantism was not changing it so it's true but it's also good beautiful rich and it brings us do we got about five minutes left and and my guests again are Ken Hensley and dr. David Andrews maybe he's a thought too close we've looked at how the history brought you into the church both been in the church 15 or more years why is being deep in history continuously important for Catholics it's placed especially at a time when all of us recognize we're going through rough times in our culture in our church you know people sometimes ask me how can you be in a church that has so many problems you know corruption this or that cleric or Bishop doesn't pat down I said look I became Catholic after I studied the medieval church for 10 years I wasn't surprised by clerical corruption I was surprised by clerical holiness and you don't judge the church you know in a singular individual unless they're a saint all right I think there are two ways you can evaluate it one of them is you can look to the Saints those who really did cooperate with the full measure of grace and you see the fruit of a Catholic life well-lived that's all the proof you need but then you can also look at the at the course of the church not on a single person but in the course of history down through the ages and I challenge anyone read Tom woods book how the Catholic Church but loss to civilization for example to see the imprint of Catholicism on world history the dignity of the human person evolving into a doctrine of human rights the adoption of creation of Revelation and reason developing into the modern University and the scientist method look how it has affected Kanna wall gets its imprint in in civil codes and and principles of justice and fair dealing and civil society take one aspect of modern culture and after another that we value you're going to find the roots of those things that we value in the catholic tradition working its way like leaven in dough throughout the course of all of human history I want to be part of that stream you cut yourself off from that stream it's back to barbarism you know good amen yeah and I guess what I will throw in is just the the the something personal that my conception of Christianity as an evangelical was that there were Jesus and the Apostles and then there's an inspired book that he basically just tossed it out and said do your best and then there are individuals I didn't have a sense of the church as a corporate entity you know there were just individuals the invisible church they're individuals all through history and all the way you know scattered all over the world who know Jesus and I live my personal relationship with Jesus well now you know I I love the sense of being part of a family on earth and this were church history comes in a family that goes all the way back I was in an evangelical a non-denominational Church just recently for the first time in a long time and I walked in I looked around there were no statues there were no there was it was nothing you know I almost accidentally genuflected were going into the pew but everyone was just talking and going in the pew and all that and then the next morning I was taken to it was at a wedding then the next morning I was taken to a Polish Catholic Church in a small country I'm in a small town in in rural Michigan and around the entire church were the stained-glass windows of all these saints you know they take me all the way back to the beginning I looked up front and I saw our Lord on the cross bleeding and dying there was Mary there was Joseph there was the you know there was the Holy Family there were all these saints and it was just a feeling to me immediately if I loved having this family and I love being a part of a family it's not just me and Jesus in my Bible anymore yeah it's very humbling which so that's mine just were a big we're a big part of this thing where it's not up for us to start from scratch and come up with the true understanding of things for the first time in history no we've received we've received and now our responsibility to pass another Basel II that's really our ain't no responsibility thank both of you hey thank you thank you anything is urine on your work and and those of you watching we're encouraging to become deep in history and so how do you do that well we've been given the gift of the Catechism yeah it's a great place to look at the the entire idea of our thought how it flows from Scripture and tradition but I also want to remind you of two sources very quickly ewtn s website has of course many resources videos and such and come to the coming on network website or deep in history comm we have dozens of free history talks that will touch on avenues of the journey in relationship to how history helps one become deeper in their Catholic faith god bless you see you again next week [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: EWTN

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Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 06 2019