The Journey Home - 2013 -07-29 - Dr. James Papandrea - Former Methodist

good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi girls for this program tonight I have that usual privilege they do wtn grants to me to come into your homes to help you hear the stories of men and women who in their love for our Lord Jesus a desire to follow God's call in their life to be obedient to our Lord to be faithful to his call to love but in that process their hearts and minds get moved to get changed and many softened if you if you will to the fullness of the church in a way maybe they never were before and in that process they discovered the fullness and the beauty of the church and so they're here to tell their story we'll find out in a moment is I also hear the story of our tonight's guest dr. James Papandreou he's a professor but he's for the context of our Prohm program he's a former United Methodist so Jim welcome to the journey home Thank You Marcus thank you it's good to be here it's good to have you here before I even start the journey I want the folk to know that you have a website WWE Papandreou apan d-r-e a.com right reason I mentioned that out front you've got a number of books people can find out the bigger details that we can't cover in in the short time we have here right yeah and so again I thank you for the journey I'm not sure if you know this but usually the first thing I do on the journey almost get out of the way as soon as I did know that yes and encourage you to go way back to the beginning of your own spiritual journey and help us know where you've come from well as I said thanks it's great to be here I I feel like I just got back from Rome actually and I feel like I'm there again with the windows here but the audience really believes that we're in an apartment ah yeah in Rome overlooking the Tiber River in San Angelo they're right over there you know there's I mean imagine to have an apartment where the window is overlooking the Vatican like that took a long time to get very special sterilized well you know going back to the beginning I'm not sure if I count as a convert or a revert because I was baptized in the church being Italian my father's family is Roman Catholic going back till forever and so when when my my brother and I were born we were baptized in the Roman Catholic Church I was baptized at st. Lambert's in Skokie Illinois so hello st. Lambert's but my mother was Protestant and so in fact I was I was born in 1963 so the Vatican - and I turned 50 this year it was a big one for me but when when we were very little we actually lived in an army base for a while Fort Dix New Jersey is was during the Vietnam War actually and after my dad got out of the service he was an army dentist after he got out of the service he my parents moved us to Wisconsin and there we ended up finding a Lutheran Church and I think that as I asked my parents about it now I think it seemed like maybe a happy medium sure and so I was confirmed raised and confirmed in the Lutheran Church and and I have to always be grateful to the Lutheran's for a couple of things the gifts that they gave me I think were number one an appreciation for liturgy now you know the time that I was in the Catholic Church I wasn't old enough to understand what liturgy was but as I grew up in the Lutheran Church I got to to appreciate liturgy and actually as it turns out it's you know the those aspects of liturgy that come from the Catholic Church anyway but you know the Scripture readings and things but and also the singing I mean the the Lutheran's gave me a real appreciation for singing and not just singing but singing theology and you know the old hymns whether they're Lutheran or Catholic or whatever the old hymns seem to have a lot more theology in them and I think I learned my theology and I learned about the Trinity from singing hymns and from paying attention to the lyrics of the hymns and the singing of hymns in the Lutheran liturgy is very central to it very I mean you're really called to sing you're proclaiming it's as I look back at my own Luther not burning it was parallel to proclaiming the Creed mm-hmm singing met him yeah yeah and of course in the Lutheran Church we had the Creed's as well and so so you know I think that I felt connected to that but didn't feel connected to the church community that much through no fault of their own probably but as a youth you know I didn't feel like there was anything drawing me or connecting me and and when we were confirmed we were told that you know you were now spiritually adults able to make your own decisions and so I left you know and now thankfully I didn't didn't feel like I didn't need God I didn't even feel like I didn't need a religion I knew that I wanted to be a part of something but I didn't feel connected there and was your spirituality a part of your private life well it came to be because we had we had a neighbor next door neighbor when I was a kid who would invite us to Bible studies in their homes and they were evangelical and the through the context of those Bible studies I had as a you know early preteen come to a point where you know I was ready to make a commitment to Jesus Christ for my life and you know you I'm sure you're familiar with sort of the evangelical presentation of the gospel in which you know it sort of leads up to a commitment praying a certain prayer or you know making some sort of commitment of turning one's life over to Jesus Christ and and so I did come to the point where I was ready to do that and and so I felt like I had accepted Jesus Christ as my savior I'd committed my life to him but you know I was pretty young so I didn't really know what that meant or or or how I would live that so as as I got into high school that sort of faded into the background more and new some some folks in a Methodist Church had a girlfriend in the Methodist Church instead of going to the Methodist youth group thing here that you you have a little album here called still quiet voice of music you wrote I'm wondering as you set the church aside did music become a big part of your life it did actually this is about at the time when I was starting to write my own songs got a guitar for Christmas one year and found it easier to write my own songs than learn other people's songs now you know my advice to young musicians out there is learn other people's songs but I took the shortcut and so I wrote my own songs but I did start writing songs that expressed not only my faith but other other parts of what I was going through and of course you know the classic mistake that all young songwriters make is that they set their diary to music so it becomes a little too personal sometimes but but I did get involved in the Methodist Church and you know what one of the gifts that they gave me early on was this idea of participation allowing people to participate and so even as a brand-new songwriter I was allowed to sing my songs in church and you know lead the youth group singing by playing the guitar and some of these things and so the idea of leadership in a faith community all of a sudden became a possibility and I even got a chance to you know teach a couple of Bible studies or youth group meetings leave you know in that sense so so so that was good the the United Methodist Church is you know as you know a denomination that sprang out of the Anglican Church and then the American wing of it is referred to as United Methodist but there's a whole sort of greater Methodist world out there and one of the interesting things about the Methodist Church that actually attracted me early on was that they they were sort of intentionally non creedal now they would back in the day they would say they were not in cradle although I think that's kind of a misnomer because the Creed's have always been in the hymnals I think they're more Creed optional as a youth and a young adult I found that attractive because it was sort of presented to me as though you can believe anything you want and you're welcome here and you can you can understand the the attraction of that kind of thinking you know you can basically believe anything you want and be welcome here and so that gave me kind of license to be you know how they'd like to say now spiritual but not religious you know I can have a faith in my heart but not necessarily follow all the rules not necessarily live according to the moral expectations of the faith etc so so I so I ended up sticking with the United Methodist Church ended up joining that that denomination and and then you know really started coming more into my faith in college I got hooked up with an outfit called Campus Crusade for Christ I'm sure you've heard of them and God bless them you know they gave me some real gifts too you know very much in line with the you talked earlier about the evangelical call for leading up to conversion I mean that's what Campus Crusade is all about in fact it was a little bit like putting together all of the gifts I had gotten up until that point because I had the evangelical commitment the commitment to scripture I had the the music because it was a youth oriented organization and so there was a lot of music and they gave me opportunities for leadership I got to lead a Bible study I got to you know play the guitar to help lead worship and so a lot of things were coming together in that sense at the same time you know I was really sort of thinking back on my faith my my grandfather my dad's father was a with a great influence on my faith even though maybe I didn't know it early on as I said you know his my dad's family was Catholic and so my grandfather was Roman Catholic and he in fact many people in my family have a great devotion to st. Padre Pio so in fact even while Padre Pio was alive they would they had a devotion to him and without going into too much detail they they really believed that his intercession had got them through through some tough times and so he had my grandfather had made a commitment that appointed his life that he was not going to miss Mass he was going to go every week and he did and in fact even when we were you know on a fishing trip with him somewhere in the northern woods of Wisconsin he would find a place to go to Mass and and that made it a real impression on me so a lot of the stuff was coming together in my life when I finished college I went out to moved out to LA and I wanted to get into the entertainment industry I wanted to be a part of filmmaking and I was especially interested in audio production being a musician sort of knew my way around a mixing board and I thought you know this is something I could do I had I'd done a lot of audio production and broadcasting in college did the college radio station thing and for a while even had a Christian music show on the college radio station but but when I got out to LA I spent about a year working in a job that was sort of the the entry-level job you know here are the cans of film go drive them over to Universal or Warner Brothers or whatever so so I was the driver I was the delivery guy the interesting thing about that though is that that I had been put in a position where I got to see people doing all the things I thought I wanted to do and as I saw others doing these things I thought you know that's really not for me I wanted to be creative and I you know I got to see a lot of people sitting in dark control rooms all day long you know and pushing buttons I thought I don't know this isn't for me and I decided to go back to school and I thought well you know what more important subject is there to study than theology I want to I need to know more about God and I have a personality that doesn't tolerate mystery very well so I wanted to you know what did all the questions answered I wanted all the mysteries solved and I thought the best way to do that is to just go to seminary so I started looking into seminaries and found that there was one very close to where I was living at the time and didn't want to move again so I thought well you know seminary is seminary right they're all basically the same because they all study the same Bible I mean this is how naive I was but thank God I mean it must have been Providence because I ended up at a place called fuller seminary Fuller Theological Seminary you know and again you know this was another gift to me and it was at fuller that I really learned I learned a lot about theology I learned a lot about doctrine I learned a lot about you know the Bible it's probably first of all for those of you just joining us our guest tonight is dr. James Papandreou former United Methodist there might be good Jim to explain fuller a little bit because yeah people may not know that you say it's a real blessing well it does a blessing for you as in then an evangelical protestant yeah talk about the beauty of fuller well for is it is and was even then a very ecumenical place it's it's a basically a non-denominational or interdenominational seminary but mostly Protestant you know I believe that probably most of the folks there come from a reformed or Presbyterian background so it was interesting because even as a Methodist I was a bit of an anomaly there but but it was just a very very good scholarly academic place to be in the sense that I mean I will say I will admit that it was at fuller that I went from being a fundamentalist to an evangelical and those are two different things as you know and so you know so it was it was a good three years that I spent there but then the problem is you know you finish with a Masters of Divinity degree what do you do with it and it just seemed like the only option was to get ordained and become a pastor so I were you saying that you weren't sensing a clear call from God to do that or was this is more reasonable logic this is what I should do yeah that is that is definitely one way to say it I mean I would have if you if you could go back in time and ask me then I would probably say that God is leading me in this direction because I don't see any other options but it was not that I felt called to ordained ministry per se now there are aspects of ordained ministry that I still feel are within my gift set but then there are aspects of ordained ministry they're not and and what I came to find out was that this one this was not my calling I mean I did get ordained I I started out as a as a as an ordained deacon on track toward what they call elders orders which is their you know version of the senior minister but I never got to that point I they that's about the time when the denomination created a permanent deacon status so I shifted to that and then was actually ordained again he was ordained twice which I even knew at that time that was a little weird but okay so but they said just go with it because you know we're in this transitional period so I cut ordained as a deacon again and and then maybe I didn't think it took the first time well you know it's big but I mean let's be fair ordination is not a sacrament in in you know the Protestant denominations and so it isn't exactly understood the same way although I think even they would say that you know normally you don't ordain somebody twice you're either ordained or you're not but but I did I got ordained again and him so I was a permanent deacon in in the denomination and served for a couple years as an associate pastor and then for a couple years in what they call a three-point charge to churches of my own to small country churches of my own and then I was the youth director at a third Church but what I found out is that you know I was I would spend my week working on my sermon you know Monday through Thursday I was writing the sermon and crafting it and it was a mini Bible study with all of the academic research involved and then on Friday afternoon I'd be like oh no I gotta go visit somebody yeah so it wasn't in my nature to to be pastoral it was very difficult for me in fact to visit people in the hospital or people who were suffering and found that just that wasn't one of my gifts and so so I decided to go back to school again and the the folks and some of the folks in the denomination had given me a kind of a hard time for not having gone to a Methodist seminary to get my m.div so I thought well I better go to a Methodist Seminary to get my PhD and I ended up at Garrett evangelical seminary and you know spoiler alert I mean that's where I ended up that's where I'm still teaching now but I did I went back to school and I had decided I wanted to study the early church I wanted to do a PhD in what we call patristic s-- the early church fathers was there a reason that you were fighting so drawn that way well as you noticed a lack or heart I had I had really enjoyed church history in seminary but I felt like I didn't get enough of the early church and I also had this idea that you know again kind of naive actually you know there was this golden age of Christianity where everything was perfect and everybody got along and sure they were persecuted but you know that if we could just recapture that and so I started studying the early church with that in mind of course soon you know realized that that's not really the case I mean you know there's in fact you know the very fact that we have the ecumenical councils and some of the doctrines that we have are the result of a long struggle of debate and arguing and sometimes even controversy so but I really did fall in love with the early church can I also ask then I'd interrupt your flow Jim sorry but whereas the Catholic Church been at all he left it as a baby mm-hmm I realize a young man yeah your attitudes towards the church was there any lean Inklings those or any connections during all this period leading up to your PhD studies yeah well that's a great question because because my father's family was Roman Catholic I never had this sort of anti-catholic bias that you know that some of our colleagues yeah you know had to overcome I always felt that that there was something to it but as a Protestant you know the sort of general assumption is that that the church was going along fine but that at some point it got off track and that the Protestant Reformation was an attempt to you know bring it back so even there for your desire to go back to the early church fathers was that very thing 94 at the beginning went off the zooming there was this time when everything was just dandy exactly and whatever it was act like okay in fact the first time I went to Rome my parents took us to Rome and I remember you know early on the first couple times going to Rome going into the the the large basilica's and seeing you know the the the way that the architects had you know tried to reflect the grandeur of God in their architecture but you know the for the first couple of times I I went there I think I had that very typical of Protestant responses that you know seeing it not as grandeur but more as opulence and seeing it through the eyes of Judas who said you know hey this money could be better spent we could have spent this money to feed the poor you know and of course you know and then you read the Bible and say oh that's that's what Judas said so you know early on I but in spite of that I was I really fell in love with Rome and I fell in love with you know what I felt was that you know the the presence of the church in Rome so when I went back to do the PhD not only was I reading the early church fathers but I got a chance to go back to Rome and I got a chance to study there I went to the American Academy in Rome and did they have a summer program and lived in Rome for a summer and took this six-week program and that's where things started to fall into place and that's where I really really gained an appreciation for the Catholic Church even though I had never been anti-catholic and I had always had sort of a background appreciation for the Catholic Church I never really started to think that that we'll wait a minute maybe I'm missing something by not being a part of this maybe that's a good place to pause that sure why don't we take a break there because this is really ruining you're on the cusp of maybe for the first time taking it a little more seriously okay good good Jim our guest tonight is dr. Jim Papandreou and we'll come back just a moment to hear the rest of the story welcome back to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host once again our guest tonight is dr. Jim Papandreou he's former United Methodist got a website wgal.com and just let you know his conversion story the complete details are on the website of the coming home network CH Network dot o-- r-- g-- org and we actually featured your story in our July 2013 newsletters connected with our with your broadcast here so so we've been erupted your journey right when you're starting I mean can you look at a moment or a place or a time or resource that the light started to come on well I mean I think you know a lot of things were coming together in my life I was studying the Church Fathers and so I was feeling drawn to the Catholic Church because as I saw it and as I see it the Roman Catholic Church is the one that is most consistent with you know what was what was going on in the early church I mean over time I came to a couple of conclusions and I that I think really really made me convinced that I I had to make a move but I but I want to preface by saying that that my conversion if if that's what it was back to the Roman Catholic Church was at the same time a conviction that I was not in fact called to ordained ministry and so so I was also discerning giving up my status as an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church which you know I mean it's it's hard to give up something like that even if you don't feel it's a perfect fit so so it was really because part of it is God what do you call me to do right I want to do what you want me to do Lord I may not like it right right what I'm doing but if that's what you want me to do of course I want to be faithful to you absolutely well that's true and of course I thought I had an easy answer to that which was that with my PhD I would teach and I would teach church history but when I finished the PhD I really there weren't any jobs forthcoming and so I you know did some part-time teaching but ended up having to take some temp jobs a temp job turned into a permanent job in a cubicle in the marketing department of a major credit card I won't say which one but really was not something that you know that was for me and so I mean I spent five years praying every day God get me out of this cubicle and so so this is what I was going through at the time and and as I was starting to say I mean I came to two conclusions throughout my study of the early church that made that convinced me that I had to make a move and you know when people asked me you know what what you know what what made you change you know my short answer is well you know I came to the conclusion that Sola scriptura is false and the real presence of the Eucharist is true and those are the those are the two conclusions now the first one you know Sola scriptura it can be a bit of a caricature I mean to be fair to the to the Protestants who who adhere to that I mean I don't think any of them really say that they can't believe anything that's not in the Bible right but the but the problem for me was is that if you if you accept the idea of Sola scriptura scripture alone that everything you need for the faith is is in the Bible you wouldn't have the Nicene Creed and and when I realized that it was a major light bulb going on over my head because the Nicene Creed is the product of you know the early church struggling with how to interpret Scripture and so you know with the Old Testament we kind of have a nice summary of the Old Testament built right into the Old Testament ten commandments with the New Testament you don't have a summary of the New Testament built into the New Testament for that you have to go to the Nicene Creed and so I really came to believe in the importance of the Cree for our understanding of the faith and once you once you accept that you have to let go of Sola scriptura because the Creed is not in the Bible and in fact you know one of the big controversies surrounding the Creed as you know was the word that they finally used in the Creed that that's not in Scripture and of course we all know what that word is consubstantial right which is why I was so happy that I got to recently got to write a book called Trinity 101 where I get to explain what the word consubstantial means but yeah so I so I came to that conclusion I also came to the other conclusion that one because I want to go on someone sure because you have your book reading the early church fathers who which is again it's such in your class what you teach is this true I mean the Nicene Creed is established before the Canon of Scripture well is essentially declared by the bishops I do deal with that in the book and reading the early church fathers I have there I have a chapter on the development of the New Testament Canon and the New Testament Canon it's very interesting because what you have it with the New Testament is not so much a definitive proclamation of years of the books that ought to be in the New Testament it's more a growing consensus to the point where you could argue that the Nicene Creed is established before there is universal acceptance and agreement on every single book of the New Testament but I wouldn't want to go so far as to say that you know the church didn't have a Bible until the fourth right so you wouldn't say it and that's a wonderful point Jim it wasn't like all of a sudden at Rome and or Carthage in 390 out of the blue they they declared these are the books given all these of none but it was the consensus of those texts that were being read in liturgy yeah for 300 some years you know what's also interesting is that when they do declare they don't they don't include in that Canon this nice seeing document but they recognize its authority alongside the can salutely absolutely well and of course one of the or the main criterion for inclusion in the New Testament is apostolic authorship so everyone knew that the Nicene Creed wasn't written by the Apostles so of course it wouldn't be in the New Testament but as you say it is authoritative it's considered authoritative yeah yeah so then the second thing that I you said really yes so I think where I was going with the story was that's right it was on the Eucharist I mean you know I I studied the early church fathers and I read what they had to say about the Eucharist and I realized that even though they didn't have the word transubstantiation yet that all of them from from you know Justin Martyr in the second century era næss all of them understood something miraculous to be happening in the Eucharist specifically the language that they used to describe what was happening in the Eucharist was language that was pulled right from the biblical accounts of the Incarnation in other words the word became flesh therefore that becoming language was used to talk about the Eucharist the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ and so it's so there's this deep connection between the Incarnation and the Eucharist and I could go on and on I have a whole lecture about this but but I really became convinced that you know that that what the Roman Catholic Church teaches today about the Eucharist is the most consistent with what you know what the early Christians were discerning about the Eucharist and in your knowledge of the Royal Church Fathers on this issue right up front they're dealing with the very criticism to this day of the Eucharist which is it doesn't look like or it doesn't taste like or it doesn't they were saying don't trust your senses mmm yeah right they weren't saying that that isn't the criteria right in a sense what they're saying is that there's aspect that's accessible to the senses and there's an aspect that's not accessible to the senses and that's the reality the one that's not accessible to the senses the one that has to be seen with the eyes of faith that's the that's the true presence that's the reality so yeah so I mean and I think I was ready to believe that anyway it's not as though I had to be convinced to believe in the real presence I was ready to believe it I just wanted a good excuse to believe it and and actually you know in it's interesting because in a lot of ways United Methodist theology is not that far from Roman Catholic with regard to an emphasis on free will and responsibility for human behavior and things like this meanness and sanctification exactly exactly on the Eucharist however it that wouldn't be the case but but I I really came to believe that I had sort of been Catholic all along and just didn't know it in a lot of ways now you know we all have those those stumbling blocks at this point in the conversion story right and and for me the difficult part was the intercession of the Saints and Mary and because I had this idea that if you believe the Saints can hear your prayers you must be ascribing some sort of omniscience to them which would be a form of idolatry and that if you believe that the Saints can do something for you you must be ascribing some sort of omnipotence to them which again would be a form of idolatry so so I had this sort of I think vague sense which I believe many Protestants do that that prayer to the Saints is a form of idolatry in some sense and and actually I had a good friend who sent me it's got hot ins book Rome Rome sweet home you know and we've talked me about this and I the answer I got made perfect sense which again it was like I was ready to believe it I just needed a reason to believe so of course the answer is you know we're when we pray to the Saints we're not asking for their intervention we're asking for their intercession the way I might ask you to pray for me I can ask someone who's who's passed on with the Lord to pray for me and it's you know prayer is asking it's not it's not worship in its essence you know so simply praying to the Saints is not worshiping the Saints and so you know once I was once I saw that clearly I was ready to to you know really move into the Catholic world but that was this while you were still in your cubicle yeah this was while I was still in my cubicle and and I had met my wife at that point we had gotten married we eloped in Rome and and we actually had gone over with with my band which I had formed a music group called remember Rome and we had actually gone to Rome to play a concert over there and so my girlfriend at the time came along and we eloped while we were there and the next year we went back actually and I remember very vividly coming to a point when I really had to surrender everything to God because while I was happy with this new marriage I was not content with where my career was you know I had a PhD but wasn't teaching except maybe part time was you know working in a cubicle to pay the bills and you know so having to do things that didn't didn't fit my nature and that we don't weren't part of my dreams and goals and I remember being in Rome thinking you know that my greatest desire was to teach church history to teach about Rome to bring people to Rome and to show them and give them the kinds of experiences I was having there and I had to say to myself that may never happen you know that that just may not happen I may work a marketing job for the rest of my life and I had to just give that up and I remember leaning on a on a column you know I mean there's no columns so I'm leaning on a 2,000 year-old column and when I do that I'm tactile so I like to touch these things I always think you know maybe Peter or Paul leaned on this column right maybe a Gustin leaned on this column but as I was touching it I found myself praying you know I and I just had to give it up and say if if I never come back here I have to just be thankful that I got here you know as many times I had and and I gave it to God I said you know what I want to do what you want me to do even if that's not what I want to do and and I just really you know had to had to come to that point of surrender and within a year of that point I was out of the cubicle and I was I had been offered I had become Catholic and my wife and I had joined a parish and then the senior pastor the pastor of the parish came to me and asked me to join the staff full-time so fortunately for me it was a large parish large enough that they could afford to have a full-time director of adult education which is what I did and I did that I do that for four years and I got the opportunity to write my first book at that point I wrote spiritual blueprint which was kind of my manifesto almost in the sense that it was it was sharing my experience of of trying to organize my life around following the will of God and because as I said you know I was happy with my marriage but I was unhappy with my job and I realized you know if you're unhappy with one thing in your life it can it can throw everything else out of whack and you can feel like everything's going wrong when in fact that's not the case and I kind of realized but you know there are these five areas of life you know you've got your relationships job Church home and and the things that you do for you know hobbies passions and stuff and and I started speaking about this and I called them the five homes these are your five homes home for your heart your relationships home for your mind home for your body home for your spirit home for your hands and publisher heard me speak and and they wanted me to write a book with them this was this was Liguori and I ended up writing spiritual blueprint for them and you know it became this this way of sharing what I had been through with other people and sharing sort of how I organized my life so that I could make sense of it and not be upset about the parts that were that were good you know so I ended up being on staff at that at that parish for four years also wrote my book on the book of Revelation at that time so I was teaching teaching Scripture a lot and and then after that I found out that a friend of mine who was the guy teaching church history at Garret where I had gone where I'd done my PhD was was leaving Garret to go to another institution and long story short I ended up getting his job and so so now I am back at the United Methodist Seminary and I'm the the one Roman Catholic on the faculty there but it's a very diverse very ecumenical faculty and I teach early in medieval church history I was eventually able to write reading the early church fathers based on the classes that I teach because when I started learning about the church fathers in the early church you know professors would throw out these names like Ignatius you know and Polycarp and Clement and you know there's two Ignatius 'iz and two Clements and so that can get confusing and so there was no really good you know book that that laid it all out and explained it for the beginner and so I decided that's what I would write so reading the early church fathers is really for the beginner studying the Church and reading the documents the primary sources of the early church so I do that and I get to I get to do a course in Rome every year where I take students to Rome and we do we look at all the most ancient churches and sites and we we really connect with early and medieval Christianity in Rome and from that I wrote my latest book which is a pilgrims guide to the Eternal City you know got an email that touches on that last subject bill from Michigan writes in dr. pop andreas travels to Italy did anything strike him in a different way after becoming Catholic yes I think that's uh it is fair to say that you know I quickly lost that sort of negative reaction that I had had at one time and you know through studying and not only studying the early church fathers but starting art and architecture I came to realize that you know just like what you know Mozart or Honda would try to do with music or what Michelangelo or Botticelli would try to do with paintings these architects sometimes the same people were trying to do that with architecture and I came to realize that that this was not opulence that I was seeing but this was this was an attempt to reflect God as creator and I really went from you know at one time having said oh you know this money could have been better spent to I need to be a part of this you know this this is bigger than anything I know of and I need to be a part of this and and you know that was a big part of my conversion I think was was coming to that point where because I again as I said I'd never been anti-catholic but I had always sort of reserve the right to say well the Catholic Church is nice but I don't need to be in it I got to the point where I said I need to be in it I need to be a part of it and and I think it's wrapped up in that whole surrendering experience because you know at some point you get to the you get to a point in your life where you will you realize how important it is to belong to something greater yourself and it's too easy in in some denominations and in in some cultures like our own it's too easy to fall into the trap of a feeling that the freedom to choose is is everything the problem with that is is that if you push that to the extreme you you become your own God you become your own highest authority and you know what I don't want that responsibility that's uh that's that's too much pressure I don't I don't want to be my own god I want to submit I want to be a part of something bigger than myself and for me you know that that was the experience that I had you know I remember that very topic myself when I looked at the hugeness of things in the church and and amount of money that it took ya to do that and I think I've come to see that over the years that the Catholic Church really has kept a good balance in that both helping the poor as well as preserving these things because on the one hand one could say well if the money hadn't gone to build st. Peter's it could have been distributed to help the poor but those poor would have lived and died at that moment and it wouldn't necessary MUP saying you know spending that money then only has an immediate impact a longer impact is the great art so you can you can go in either direction but the church has always said it's a both/and it is well firmly believe that I mean you know we have in the present world we have some denominations that are really good at the social justice but not maybe not so good at the the the faith of the heart or the you know that the devotional aspect we have other denominations that are really good at devotions but you know can fall into the trap of using that as an excuse to be sort of you know detached from the world yeah and I really do believe the Catholic Church has that balance and you know I told you I had a music group for a long time I had this group called remember Rome and you know we played everything from you know bars coffee houses played all the bookstore's back when bookstores had stages in them and but over time you know my music shifted from being sort of you know love songs and vaguely positive message to more overtly Christian but then eventually it it became even I would say overtly Catholic in the sense that you know I this latest CD that I just released has a lot of Eucharistic themes in it and so so even in my songwriting that has been coming out almost in spite of myself I mean you know and I found myself really thinking and writing about these kinds of themes that that that are not just Christian but more specifically Catholic alright Sam from Oklahoma writes the early church fathers are so fascinating what does Jim believe are a couple key elements in the church fathers teachings that would be particularly relevant to someone considering becoming Catholic well let's see a couple key elements well I mentioned the their their thoughts on the Eucharist and I really do believe that that what the early church fathers were teaching as much as they could understand it was is what we believe about the Eucharist so that's really significant for me because you know you won't necessarily find that in in very many other denominations some other things I mean I am for me it's very important to focus on doctrine when I teach church history I'm very heavy on historical theology so for example the the discernment of doctrine that led up to the Nicene Creed is extremely important to me and so the fact that we as Catholics say the Creed every week as a part of our mass I think that's that's extremely significant in fact I'm even disappointed when we say the Apostles Creed and not the Nicene Creed I want to say consubstantial but yes so I think I think those are a couple things that what about also and you're far more learned at studied in there your father than I am I wish I had the time to and ability to do that but one thing that struck me also was it seemed that the earliest church fathers particularly recognized the continuity of the people of God all the way Adam through their Old Testament through the New Testament one one stream and it seems to me you see that because their quote in the Old Testament right up for everything they don't see that it's an old book this is the now this is the right that was their Bible especially you know the the earliest the earliest church writers quote the Old Testament more than they quote the New Testament because many of them are in conversation with Jewish believers or for those you know if they're if they're in conversation with pagans they're again showing that connection and showing how ancient this faith is this is not a brand new faith that we just came up with now this is connected back to the to the Old Testament and I would say also that the concept of apostolic succession became very important to me the idea that that what we believe has been taught down through the ages going back to the Apostles and through them to Jesus himself that there's that continuity as well in the church what about the critique that come from some of our separate brethren that the absence of liturgy in the New Testament documents and in the actual writings are those many of the early church fathers how do you address that question well I would say that the liturgy is not entirely absent in the New Testament I mean I think we have we have snippets we have quotations mostly probably in the letters of Paul where he he has bits of creedal statements bits of hymns I talked about that in in Trinity 101 quite a bit actually there are pieces in 1st Corinthians where he's quoting what the what he's what he's received from the other apostles about the Eucharist and sort of you know the The Last Supper stuff and so so I think we do have that but then also what we know by the middle of the second century we have just a martyr's description of what happens in liturgy which is you know very close to what we still do and so that clearly was not new when Justin was writing it and so you know the liturgy develops very early in fact I think you can make the case that that liturgy develops before doctrine so that the fact that the early Christians were already worshipping Christ becomes the the catalyst for them to have to explain why you know and and so of course the answer to that question is the doctrine of the Trinity but but before they had an understanding a full understanding of that they knew it was was right to worship Christ and they were doing it by singing to him praying in his name saying Creed's statements of faith that make him the object of faith all of these things and so you know that's that's happening very early on it's already happening even before Paul writes his letters so Colin from Maine writes how do I respond to my Protestant friend who claims that Catholics and doctrines to the Bible and believe in traditions that Jesus never intended how do we respond that Catholics believe in well traditions and doctrines the doctrine is something that is expands over time when I say expands is maybe not be the best word but every doctrine that we believe has its seeds in the New Testament so it's already there and you know we can show how you know every Catholic doctrine is is present in Scripture but you know you don't have a full understanding of it in the scriptures so the understanding of it expands over time it these doctrines become further verified so that what we now have as our doctrines and again I go through this a lot in my book Trinity 101 because you know I show how the doctrine of the Trinity for example is is in Scripture but it had to be explained and clarified outside of Scripture so so again it's that balance thing because on the one hand it's the doctrines are all there in Scripture but on the other hand you can't go so far as to say well Sola scriptura everything we need is there we still needed to have the explanations and the clarifications come up over time you know as far as the traditions you know there's there's tradition with a capital T and there are their traditions with a small T and you know some of those things do change over time and I mean the very fact that we have mass in our own language now is you know one of the things well one thing I do know for sure when we read in the letters of Paul particularly is that there certainly seems to be a deposit of teaching that has been passed on orally that he's presuming that he shares with the people he's right absolutely and the reason he's writing a letter is because there's a problem right and that deposit ain't the problem so he's not necessary mentioning it and the Trinity could be one of those issues as well as liturgy right it wasn't it wasn't the key issue that's right and you know that would be the reason why you know Jesus didn't talk about certain things to just it didn't come up it wasn't an issue everybody agreed on it so you know that's right or at least it wasn't reported didn't yeah in the Gospels because it wasn't the issue dr. Pepin drea Jim thank you very much for joining us and pleasure I want to make sure to mention your name again so we're looking to catch that your website to find out more what you're doing thank you very much for sharing your Judy and encourage your books for those that are still on the journey and want understand more about the teaching of the church thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home god bless you see you again next week you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 20,088

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Keywords: Catholic, EWTN, Christian, television, JHT01399

Id: ttDEQryVI2Q

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 30 2013