Joshua Charles, from the “Becoming Catholic” blog, describes his discovery that when the Church Fathers talked about heresy, the things they described sounded remarkably similar to his own Protestant beliefs.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host. Very happy to welcome Joshua Charles this time. I think maybe, possibly, the first White House speechwriter we’ve ever had on here, although I couldn’t guarantee it. I’m not sure. But you can find his work at joshuatcharles.com. You can find him on Twitter @JoshuaTCharles.
He’s been writing about becoming Catholic, and we were very struck by his writing. He’s a wonderful writer and historian. And very struck by his writing, so we wanted to ask him about a series that he’s done there on the Becoming Catholic part of his work, where he talked about how… Well, essentially, the title has to do with how, “When the fathers of the church talked about heresy, they were talking about my Protestantism.” Joshua Charles, thank you very much for being here with us.
Joshua Charles:
Thank you, Cy. As I told you before, I’ve heard many of your broadcasts over the years, and they played a big role in my converting. So thank you very, very much indeed.
Cy Kellett:
Well, you’re very gracious to say it. It’s starting to feel a little bit like we’re reaching a critical mass in Catholic media, where there’s people like you, and all the way from the Matt Fradds to the EWTNs of the world, where rather than being filtered through a media that’s a bit hostile to Christianity, the truth about the Catholic Church is able to get out there directly towards people. Are you feeling that?
Joshua Charles:
Yeah, I think so. I think we’re in a very weird time, which that could be a whole other podcast. But I think there are so many things that are shaking that none of us probably imagined would ever be shaking in our lifetime, such as even the very issue of gender and sex. We can’t even agree on what male and female are anymore.
And so I think in the midst of that, while there are certainly broad swaths of the population that are being swept up in it and falling away, I think there is a growing minority of people who are really searching for answers, and frankly, Protestantism doesn’t cut it. And I say that as a former Protestant who loves many of my… Most of my mentors are still Protestant. Many of my closest friends are still Protestant.
Love them dearly. A number of them have converted already, others are on their way, I think. But Protestantism just simply doesn’t provide solid answers to the faith. I think when people go on YouTube, which is a very huge platform for my generation particularly, they find Catholic Answers, they find Trent Horn, they find Matt Fradd, and they’re giving way more substantive answers than they’ve been getting.
Cy Kellett:
This is what happened to you. You started to get substantive answers that raised an interest in your mind or a doubt in your mind or both?
Joshua Charles:
Yeah. It’s a little more complicated with that for me. I came into the church fully in July 2019. I made the decision to convert and announced it publicly in February 2018. The extremely short version is, I’ve loved my Bible since I was a little kid, studied it very deeply, had multiple study Bibles.
I’m a concert pianist, so when I was a teenager, I would… I wasn’t a concert pianist when I was a teenager, but I was heading in that direction and I would teach piano lessons and I would save up money. For a high school kid, $60 a month or something from a parent to teach their kid is not bad. So got a few students, and I would save them up just to buy study Bibles most of the time.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Joshua Charles:
So I could get the commentaries. Oh, yeah. No, and writing from Luther and Calvin and guys like R.C. Sproul and Ravi Zacharias and Josh McDowell and whatnot. So I always loved the Bible. Long story short, I had about a decade-long process at the end of my teen years, you could say, where I just wasn’t finding what Protestantism offered in Scripture, which is very ironic because I never read a single Catholic, never read a Church Father in that whole period, and I didn’t feel any particular denominational loyalty either.
We were at evangelical churches, non-denom churches, Methodist churches, Reformed churches, just wherever it seemed biblical, wherever they weren’t compromising on things like life and marriage, and wherever they believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God. And as long as they had a good community, my family was fine being there. So I was never in any particular congregation that I fully agreed with everything they believed.
But in general, there are certain through-lines that many Protestant denominations in the United States have, asking Jesus into your heart or the various tenets of Calvinism and whatnot. None of these beliefs are universal among Protestants, but they’re very prominent. And I just wasn’t finding them in Scripture. I couldn’t square Paul and Christ if various Protestant tenets were true. And this was growing increasingly distressing for me.
Because Christ said, “If you love me, you’ll obey my commandments.” And I really wanted to love Him, and I had always tried to figure out the best way to do that and live according to it. But I could no longer do that, so I even stopped evangelizing for a period. I went to a Christian law school, a great law school, Regent University in Virginia Beach. And I partly went there so I could hopefully find a wife and whatnot. But I stopped evangelizing, and I stopped dating after the first year precisely because of this issue.
I knew if I was going to be married, I’d have to guide my family and my children in the faith, but I couldn’t even articulate that faith anymore. I had a very strong personal belief and love of Christ, so I trusted He would get me through it. But I simply could not articulate the gospel anymore. So anyway, in that situation, I finished law school in May, June 2017, and I moved back to California.
And I decided to treat myself. I was… full-time job at the Museum of the Bible. I just finished a huge project there. And 2017 was when they were opening the building in Washington DC. Great museum for anybody who hasn’t been. And so my boss basically told me, “All right, Josh, you’re done with your big project.” It was a Bible project, actually, the Global Impact Bible, if people want to look it up.
But there’s usually a few months between when you’re done with the manuscript and when it’s printed and all that. So my boss basically said, “Josh, we are completely focused on getting the building in DC ready, so literally study whatever you want, and we’ll make it into exhibits after we’re open.” I’m like, “Okay. For a bibliophile like me, who’s loved reading since I was literally two or three, that was great.”
And so I had always seen this multi-volume set of the Church Fathers, the famous Schaff set, the 38 volumes. And I’m a bibliophile, but it was just too expensive during most of college. It was multiple months of rent for me. So I decided I’d treat myself as a reward for graduating law school with this 38-volume set, which I got for a pretty good price. I think it was $1,200 on christianbook.com at the time. I think it’s $2,500, $2,700 now. And so anyway, I got it. It arrived in June and I began reading. I was not looking for the Catholic Church.
It would be too far to say I’d given up hope on threading these needles that I described earlier, but it would be closer to the truth than is perhaps comfortable to admit. And so again, personal faith in Christ, I’ve never seen somebody slip away from Christianity or go, for lack of a better term, more left, more liberal, except when they or someone they know have sexual morals that are slipping. So nothing like that was happening. I just didn’t know how to resolve these issues.
So anyway, I get the 38 volumes, and I begin reading. Well, I was shocked. Sorry, frog in the throat there. But I was shocked by what I read, and my confirmation saint is St. Ignatius of Antioch, which I’m sure you know is in the very first 70 years after our Lord ascended into heaven. He’s a disciple of the apostles. I call him St. Ignatius, the red pill, because that’s what he did to me. And then Clement of Rome, and I could talk about a lot of details.
So anyway, I was so shocked. I was like, “Oh, my goodness, I have to get to the bottom of this. This is huge.” At the most, I thought I’d find some really cool martyrdom accounts. I literally thought when I would begin reading these ancient Christians, I’d find a bunch of Christians who were in semi-quasi-independent congregations, trying to understand the Bible as best they could. I had no idea what I would encounter, and what I encountered was the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church.
Cy Kellett:
When you’re reading Ignatius, what jumps out at you? Is it the insistence on being in union with your bishop? Or is it the sacramental talk? What’s the thing that red pills you there?
Joshua Charles:
Both. He talks about the structure of the church with bishops and priests and deacons, which is still the Catholic Church to this day. He talks about them succeeding directly from the apostles. He talks about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, in an extremely real way, for lack of a better term, just very physical even. He’s saying that the heretics of those days were denying the real presence of Christ.
I was like, “Oh, that sounds familiar.” Also, I noticed in his letter to the Church of Rome, it was very different from the other letters. He’d said some wonderful things to all the churches that are very highfalutin language and whatnot. But in the letter to the Church of Rome, it was the only church he spoke of commanding other churches. He said, “I don’t issue orders to you because I’m not Peter and Paul.”
He was also an extremely early witness to Peter and Paul being in Rome, which some Protestants, to this day, will try to cast doubt on. It was just many of those things. Obedience, the necessity of unity among Christians, which again, that was something I saw clearly in Scripture. And I kept wondering, “How on earth are we to have unity if we can’t agree on what the Bible means and there’s no method for resolving that with finality?” I saw in Scripture there was a method.
The apostles and the elders gathered, and they issued a divine decree, essentially, saying this is what the faith is. I was like, “None of my Protestant churches do that.” I finally get with Ignatius, and so apostolic succession, real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the sacrifice of the Eucharist. That’s very important because it’s something that every Protestant sect denies. So St. Ignatius of Antioch was saying all these things. And then, of course, that’s skipping some other fathers as well, like Clement of Rome.
Cy Kellett:
What you’re seeing is when you start reading the earliest Church Fathers, the ones we would call the apostolic fathers then, the ones who were alive at the time of the apostles themselves.
Joshua Charles:
One or two generations away. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So what you’re seeing is what our colleague here, Joe Heschmeyer, wrote in his book, The Early Church Was the Catholic Church. You look at that and go, “Oh, that looks like Catholicism right there.”
Joshua Charles:
Yeah. I love Joe, by the way. He’s amazing. So yeah, exactly. And then I decided I need to get to the bottom of this. So as I said, my boss at the Museum of the Bible had told me, “Do what you want. We’ll make it into exhibits later.” So I literally made reading the Fathers, nine to 12 hours a day, my job for nine months. And not just the Fathers. Eventually, I added in other books as well. I would watch hours… I’m sure you guys are very familiar with James White.
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Joshua Charles:
So I wanted to get the best arguments from the Protestant side. So I watched every single one of his debates, which was hours. And I think there were somewhere between 10 and 15 of them. I forget. But I watched every single one. So I was absolutely going to town, and I racked up all the money.
I added it all up, how much I was spending. I won’t say what it was. But I kept being reminded of the Pearl of Great Price. So you buy the field to get the pearl. I was like, “If this is the case, I need to… I really do. This is like marriage. You don’t go back from this. It’s either true or it’s not. And if it’s true, your whole life changes.”
Cy Kellett:
So this is what you wrote on your blog, Becoming Catholic, “One of the most striking discoveries I made in the writings of the Church Fathers is that every time they spoke about heresy and heretics, they were describing me and my Protestantism.” What does that mean?
Joshua Charles:
Basically, it means Protestantism is all over the place on the different positions. You can’t speak about the Protestant position on something, except perhaps in the form of a negative, like they’re contrary to the Catholic Church, they’re contrary to the Roman Pontiff.
But the methods, the means, by which Protestants arrive at their theological conclusions were common in virtually all the heresies and the heretics that the Fathers talk about. So I list out six from that particular part of the blog. The first one is: first, they separate from the Catholic Church and deny its authority. It’s like, “Okay. Well, that’s what we Protestants did.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh, so wait. So just to be clear, you’re not saying there then that the content of the ancient heresies is the same as the content of Protestantism. You’re saying that the way you end up there is the same path to heresy.
Joshua Charles:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
And the first step is to deny the authority of the universal church.
Joshua Charles:
Yes. And again, even in the Fathers, this idea, frankly, that pre-1054 or pre-1517, the reality was some wonderful monolithic union of Christians as opposed to today, where it’s all divided, that’s just false. It’s just false. The Catholic Church has always been the one true church. It’s always been, I think, the vast majority of Christians. But this phenomenon of heresy and schism has been a part of the church’s pilgrimage on earth from the very beginning.
The Fathers talk about it constantly. And the heretics in the ancient period were ending up with all sorts of different positions just like Protestants do. St. Vincent of Lérins talks about that. He said, “The reason we need the authority of the Catholic Church is because if you don’t, you’ll have as many interpretations of Scripture as you have interpreters.” And I was like, “Whoa, that’s exactly the problem I’ve been in. How do I arrive at what’s the truth? If I want to love Christ, He says to love Him, I need to know his commandments, I need to obey them. But how do I know what His commandments are if all these wise and good people I know are all disagreeing about them on many different issues?”
So the second one is they interpret Scripture on a new and novel principle and deny being bound by any apostolic and ecclesial tradition. This is something that really blew my mind because St. Athanasius of Alexandria, many Protestants claim to love him. But then, when you actually read his writings, it’s consistently the Arians who are using a Sola Scriptura-like argument, where St. Athanasius is appealing to the constant teaching of the church. He says in one work, basically, “Who learned this in his catechesis? This has never been taught before.” And so he appealed to tradition quite openly.
He appealed to the ruling of a pope, Pope Dionysius, I think, in the 200s. He said, “This is not a new thing.” He said, “The Council of Nicaea has now condemned it, but it was condemned by all,” a very interesting phrase, basically affirming the papacy. He said, “This was condemned by all, by Pope Dionysius.” And I forget what the year was, but it was in the third century.
So the third one was that based on this novel principle, they concoct a new set of beliefs around which they form their own sect, which they erroneously claim is Christian in the true faith. So this was something that many of the fathers talk about, that all the heretics wish to be called Christian. And there’s even many parts where they will say basically that some of the heretics want to be called Catholic.
And I’ve heard many Protestants claim, “Well, we’re Catholic, we’re Catholic,” little C Catholic. But the fathers roundly deny them that possibility. They literally say the exact same thing of ancient heretics. They said, “They wish to be called Catholic, but whenever anybody asks where the Catholic Church is, none of them will point to their own congregations because no one will know what they’re talking about.”
So literally, the exact same sorts of arguments some Protestants will make about, “Well, we’re little C Catholics,” a version of it was being made by ancient heretics all over the place. You see that St. Augustine specifically talks about this. St. Cyril of Jerusalem specifically talks about this. So that was another thing. Fourth one… And there’s six of these. Fourth, to justify their heresy, their primary tactic is to cite and quote Scripture as much as possible so that their new religion sounds “biblical.” This is something St. Vincent-
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Joshua Charles:
Oh, yeah, it happens all the time.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Joshua Charles:
Yeah, happens all the time. Vincent of Lérins explicitly mentions this. He says, “Do heretics quote Scripture?” He’s like, “They do with a vengeance.” He says, “There’s nothing of all their errors that they won’t drip with Scripture to make it seem like it’s true.” He said, “They’re basically dripping their poison with honey, the honey of divine language.”
So the fifth, they were often named after the men who started them. This is a big one because there are many Protestants who will say proudly, “I’m Lutheran,” or “I’m Calvinist,” or “I’m Armenian,” or whatever it may be. Sometimes they’ll be by the category, a theological category like, “I’m a Baptist,” or “I’m a Methodist,” or whatever. But most of them are named after the names of the men who founded them.
So again, I was reading this from the Fathers. They were often pointing this out. I was like, “This is exactly what Protestants do.” And again, they try the, “Well, we’re a little Catholic kind of thing,” but that doesn’t work for the reason that I already stated. So the name that they will be known by is the founder of their sect. And so that was known.
And then sixth and finally, their beliefs and definitions of their own heresies constantly shift and change, whereby the certainty and unity of faith to which we are commanded by the apostles is subjected to endless argumentation. So this is the great poison of heresy as it makes the faith seem uncertain. And you see this in Scripture in Acts 15, the apostles refer to the Judaizing heretics, saying they are trying to unsettle your minds.
They make that term, “unsettle your minds.” And so that’s what all heresy does. It seeks to unsettle the mind of the church. And so the church has to respond by issuing an authoritative condemnation and explanation and articulation of the faith, which it’s done with all the councils, various papal definitions and whatnot.
So again, it was another similar method, another similar phenomenon of heresy itself that I saw all over Protestantism. Basically, what I thought was normal Christianity, the Fathers are roundly saying, “No, this is a key characteristic of heresy.”
Cy Kellett:
So what you’ve kind of done is like a taxonomy of heresy that it is heretical if it has these six qualities.
Joshua Charles:
Basically. Yeah. And note, as you already alluded to, none of them have to do with the particular beliefs of the heresy. It’s all about method because they all share the same methods.
Cy Kellett:
So these are six features of heresy that you say you’re reading the various Fathers of the Church and you had the 37 volume set there. So you’ve extrapolated those. But can you give us any of the language of the Fathers that led you to extrapolate from that, maybe from Athanasius? I think the three that you covered were Athanasius, Isidore and Epiphanius.
Joshua Charles:
Yeah. And there’s many more coming. Tertullian talks about it. He’s technically not a Church Father because, as you know, he fell away from the church at the end of his life. But there are many, many others coming. But there’s many of them, one from St. Isidore of Seville, early 600. I don’t have it in front of me. But he basically says something to the fact of, “All the heretics disagree violently with one another, but they’re united by a same hatred of the Catholic Church.”
So again, that immediately struck me as a Protestant like, “Whoa, that’s us.” I can’t get a straight answer from all my Protestant brethren who I love very much, I can’t get a straight answer on baptism, I can’t get a straight answer on sacraments, I can’t get a straight answer on various moral questions or the governance of the church and whatnot. But they all agree that we’re not part of the Catholic Church. So that’s one example.
There’s a quote from Discourse 1 against the Arians in section one in which St. Athanasius say that, “They affect to array herself,” meaning the heresy, “in Scripture language, like her father the devil, and is forcing her way back into the Church’s paradise.” There’s another one where he talks about… I didn’t go through all these quotes beforehand. But essentially, he says that, again, heretics or heresies are usually identified by the founders. So he talked about how the Arians started going by Arius and not by Catholic. And in some cases could be-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. I’m actually looking at that quote because you have it in your writing. “Thus, though Arius be dead, and many of his party have succeeded him, yet those who think with him, as being known from Arius, are called Arians.”
Joshua Charles:
Exactly. And again, it struck me. It’s just part of the nature of truth. There are many Protestants who are very strong on the topic of absolute truth versus relative truth, relativism versus being truth as a category. Nancy Pearce is one example. She’s written some wonderful books about how the… What’s the name of a great book she did? It’s something about truth. So what I realized is we Protestants, at least the ones who are really attempting to be faithful and follow Scripture, we believed in the absolute nature of truth.
But then, when it got to Jesus, we were making all sorts of excuses for disagreeing about every single topic, basically. We have some broader meta topics where we believe Scripture comes from God and things like that. But there was this inevitable process that the essence of the faith was constantly getting dumbed down and deracinated because there could just be so little agreement on things.
So I kept wondering, “Well, how can we believe that truth is absolute and Christ really is who he says he is, but then once we actually have some sort of vague, usually, emotional acceptance of him, it’s free, it’s free game from what he actually taught?” Truth was all over the place, apparently. And then there’s another one. I compare this with Luther because Luther, he would occasionally try to quote the Fathers like he agreed with them. But many other times he’d flat-out say, “No, they’re all wrong.”
So there was this quote from Luther. This is section 530 of his table talk. And there are other quotes like this from Luther as well. Guys like Dave Armstrong, great writer, apologist, has written about this. He said, “Behold, what great darkness is in the books of the Fathers concerning faith.”
And then he lists all these different fathers, whatnot. Augustine wrote nothing to the purpose concerning faith. So much for Augustine being the great Proto-Protestant. “I can find no exposition upon the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians, wherein anything is taught pure and right.” And so anyway, he says, “The more I read the books of the Fathers, the more I find myself offended.” And so I would read that. But then I’d read, again, from Discourse 1 against the Arians from St Athanasius.
This is what he says, “But if they themselves,” the Arians, “own that they have heard it,” their heresy, “now for the first time, how can they deny that this heresy is foreign and not from our fathers? But what is not from our fathers, but has come to light in this day, how can it be but that of which the blessed Paul foretold that in latter times some shall depart from the sound faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils in the hypocrisy of liars; cauterized in their own conscience, and turning from the truth?”
He’s quoting 1 Timothy 4:1. So there are many, many examples of these sorts of things where you simply read how the Fathers describe heresy and heretics and almost, universally, the methods they describe are still used by Protestants today and even affirm to be part of Christian orthodoxy.
Cy Kellett:
So the question that it all leads to then… Well, there’s two things probably that I should get to before I let you go. And one of them is that I can see, because we get this question, why should I care what these Church Fathers say? I’ve even spoken to a Protestant pastor who told me, “Well, the church was already falling away from the truth while the Apostles were still alive.” And I think, “Well, then how do you know any truth at all?”
Joshua Charles:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
But what would you say to the Protestant person who says, “Okay, fine. What if the Church Fathers were all Catholic? What does that matter to me? The Bible is Protestant”?
Joshua Charles:
Sure. Well, that’s why it goes back to disciples of the Apostles: Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, who are saying extremely Catholic things. This would be a big topic, but I think I can sum it up fairly quickly. So I actually just wrote a blog post called Becoming Catholic #38… on that blog show is: Protestantism’s Mormonism Problem.
Now, to be extremely clear at the very front, I’m not saying Protestants are equivalent to Mormons or vice versa. They have mostly different theology on most topics. However, they share a very significant overlap, and that is their theory of history related to this very question. So I had a bunch of Mormon missionaries coming over recently. It was great. I had them over five or six times. One of my best friends from high school is Mormon. He did his mission and whatnot.
So I was very familiar with how Mormons basically go about trying to prove the Book of Mormon to you. They want you to ask for a burning in the bosom, whatnot. But I was focusing on a particular topic with these missionaries, and the topic was their “churches” teaching about the Great Apostasy. This is what they call it. You can find this on the LDS website, official church teaching. They literally believe… They’ll say that Peter had the keys, they’ll say the apostles had priesthood authority. But after the death of the last apostle, that all came to an end, and the church basically fell away.
They said there was some truth here and there, but that the church fell away basically completely. And so what I realized reading the Fathers, and what I realized more and more continuing to read them virtually every day, is that while many Protestants would deny that they think everything fell apart after the death of the last apostle, functionally, that’s what they believe.
Here’s why. So there are three doctrines the Church Fathers are absolutely unanimous on. I have yet to find a single exception. One, baptism or generation; two, apostolic succession, linear succession from the apostles and three, the sacrifice of the Eucharist. So what does that have to do with how we become Christians, how the church is governed and how we worship as Christians?
So most Protestants reject all three. You’ll find Lutherans and Anglicans, for example, who may accept elements of baptism or generation and apostolic succession. There’s still some problems with it, but Lutherans and Anglicans together constitute less than 20% of worldwide Protestantism. And then all Protestants reject the sacrifice of the Eucharist. So virtually, all Protestants reject these three universal… Not just universal, not just virtual majority. Unanimous doctrines among the Church Fathers. And you see this immediately with Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, whatever.
So here’s the very disturbing and I think unavoidable, it’s logically unavoidable, conclusion of this. The Protestants must believe that there was exactly what the Mormons describe, a Great Apostasy after the death of the last apostle. Because literally, every single Christian source we have affirms… if these doctrines come up, they affirm these Catholic doctrines. Now, what does that necessarily mean?
It means that what Christ, the Son of God, the Incarnate Logos established, fell apart almost immediately. But what men, such as Luther and Calvin, recovered in their version of events in the 1500s, and has now been available for 500 years, that that was stronger and more enduring than what Christ himself established. Because Protestants will believe that some form of the true gospel has been available and all over the world in many ways for now 500 years.
But if they are right in their doctrinal denials of Catholic doctrine, the true gospel was absolutely nowhere immediately after the apostles. So what men reestablished was stronger than what Christ himself established. So it really gets you in an extremely troubling place. But then also, there’s multiple promises Christ directly gives the church. He says to the apostles, “I’ll be with you to the end of the age.” How can that be possible if the individual apostles will die? Well, it refers to their successors as well.
He clearly gives the authority to render verdict and theological controversy says that heaven itself will stand behind this. So if that’s going to be denied, well, then how is that function even fulfilled in the church? Christ gave it to His church. So where does it go? Christ said that the Holy Spirit will guide you, referring to the apostles, into all truth. Where does that go? And then to say nothing of the wonderful Old Testament prophecies we have of the church.
Daniel, in Daniel 2, describes… he says, “The God of heaven in the days of those kings,” referring to the Romans, says, “He will establish an eternal kingdom,” essentially. Says, “Its authority and its sovereignty will not be passed to another.” Where does that kingdom go? He says it’s a stone that destroys the base of this tower, this tower of pagan kingdoms. I’m sorry, not tower. A statue. And he says it fills the whole earth like a mountain. It’s a mountain that fills the whole earth. It’s the mountain of the Lord that Isaiah talks about.
This is the church. All the Fathers interpret this as the church. Where did that church go? Again, these three doctrines: baptism or generation, apostolic succession, sacrifice of the Eucharist, how we become Christians, how the church is governed and how we worship. These are universal. Universal. And of course, to the extent a Protestant wants to say, “Well, they all got it wrong. We’re getting it right.” Again, that’s where it goes back to the Church Fathers’ descriptions of heretics. They all claim the same thing. They all claim the same thing.
And here’s the final coup de grace, so to speak. As we’ve alluded to, Protestantism is all over the place. There’s many well-meaning people, many people who are trying to do their best and I believe they have good hearts. I’m here to judge no man. I don’t even know if I’ll be in heaven. I hope. But many good people, they’re doing their best but they’re all over the place. And so the question then becomes, “Well, we restored the gospel, we took it back. Well, what did you restore?” I can’t even get straight answers on most issues. So what did you restore?
And so meanwhile the Catholic Church, one of the things I was looking for… I’m sure you know the Denzinger text. So I took, I think, a less common approach to the church and her claims. Said, “Okay. If the Catholic Church is what she claims to be, I should expect to find something, and that is great stability in her teaching.”
So my approach wasn’t, “The Catholic Church needs to prove to me absolutely every little jot and tittle of its doctrine. But will I find continuity? And if I do, that’s not necessarily an apodictic proof of Catholic claims, but it’s a very strong point in its defense because why? The truth doesn’t change. Jesus Christ is the same today, yesterday and forever. The truth doesn’t change. And that’s exactly what I found, the Catholic Church was extremely consistent. I can read, you can read, Catholics today can read the vast majority of the Church Fathers and it’s the same faith.
They describe the same worship, they describe many of the same sacraments. Has our vocabulary become more precise? Absolutely. And by the way, that’s something the Church Fathers talk about as well. They say when the church is challenged by heretics, it retools, it re-gears, it defines its terms more precisely. Augustine talks about this, St. Pope Gregory the Great talks about this, other Church Fathers talk about this.
So are there ways in which the church’s vocabulary has been refined and made more specific? Absolutely. But you’ll see the same description of baptism and the fathers as you see today. You’ll see the same description of the sacrifice of the Eucharist and the fathers as you see today. Same thing with so many different elements. Even little things. The Fathers described Catholics crossing themselves, the sign of the cross. Even little things like that, and many of the ancient liturgies, they contain language that is in the mass, both the traditional Latin Rite and the Novus Ordo to this day.
And so there was just so much continuity that I was like, “Man, these Protestants claim that they have the true interpretation of Scripture, yet they can’t even agree among themselves on anything. They’ve split, split, split more and more and more over just the last 500 years. But the Catholic Church, whose authority they essentially claim is arbitrary, it’s just making stuff up. It’s consistent from the first century to today on so many items.”
So I think history, flatly, not only disproves Protestant claims, but it disproves the Protestant contention that affirming an infallible magisterium necessarily leads to arbitrary man-made teaching, that the history of the Catholic Church just flatly disproves that.
Cy Kellett:
That which puts one in mind of Cardinal Newman’s, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” I can see how, to some ears, that might sound triumphalist. And it’s not a triumphalism, I don’t think. It’s a matter of history does present truths and the study of it does present us with truths about human beings and the fact that there is no apostasy in the early church. It never happened, that that’s a pretense.
Joshua Charles:
Not a Great Apostasy. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Yeah. Not that there’s no instance of apostasy, but there’s no Great Apostasy. The church itself does not ever apostatize. But I want to ask you a strategic question here at the end, because it does seem to me that you’re writing in Becoming Catholic is not an act of confrontation as much as it’s an act of love.
It seems to me that you found something that you want other people to find. It’s easy to become somewhat frustrated and go, “Come on,” to have that kind of attitude. But you don’t have that attitude. So what’s the strategic… What’s the thing we should learn about how to share this history in a way that will actually bring people to the fullness of the Christian faith and not just bang off the ears and roll down the street?
Joshua Charles:
Sure. No, it’s a great question. I’d have to think about that some more. But a few preliminary thoughts that come to mind are: number one, I’m a pretty direct person. So you’re not going to please everybody, and there are certainly times that I’ve said certain things that various Protestants have been upset by it.
And I get it because I’ve been there. So I try to express empathy as much as I can like, “Look, I used to believe exactly what you’re saying, but here’s the evidence.” So realizing you’re not going to please everybody, number one. Number two, because you’re not going to please everybody, who’s the focus? It’s people of goodwill. I’m not here to focus on people who don’t have goodwill. And frankly, there are a lot of people in this world who don’t have goodwill.
I had a lot of emotional hang-ups with becoming Catholic. Won’t go into all the details. But I’m a red-blooded male, and there are things that as a Protestant, many Protestants believe about even relations within marriage that the Catholic Churches know. And so even things like that were somewhat of an emotional hang-up for me quite frankly. But even when I was discovering where this was all going, I became very depressed. Eventually, I became wonderfully joyful, but at first I was very depressed.
I barely went out of my house for three weeks one time. I kept studying and reading. But it’s shocking to realize that most of what you’ve been told most of your life is false. It’s shocking. That’s not a pleasant experience that any of us wish. So I try to empathize with that. Number two, I just try to be factual. When John Henry Newman said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,” he has a long precatory statement to that. But he’s not gloating. In many ways, the “gloat” of the Catholic Church is that, “Yeah, most of the time we suck, but this stuff is still here.”
Cy Kellett:
And you still belong here.
Joshua Charles:
Yeah. And that was another thing in the Fathers, they constantly address this issue of bad Catholics and wickedness within the church. This is not a new issue. And frankly, even as a Protestant, it wasn’t that convincing to me as a Protestant looking among the denominations. Because I was like, “If something’s true, that doesn’t mean that somebody who ascends to it will necessarily follow it because we all have free will.” But with these Becoming Catholics, I literally have 30 more articles on my computer that are in varying degrees of completion. And the reason why is I try to be as factual as possible. I want to make sure my sources are right, the quote is right.
I did a lot of work on the founding fathers before becoming Catholic. In fact, the dean of my law school, when I first got to the law school, great guy. He was raised Catholic, but he’s going Eastern Orthodox now. Hoping to bring him back. But he said to me, “If you do with the Church Fathers…” who I didn’t know who they were. But he said, “If you do with the Church Fathers what you do with the founding fathers,” which is essentially read through thousands and thousands of pages of their writings, he said, “You’ll probably end up Catholic.
He was right. And the other part is it came as… At first, it was depressing. But then it came as great news to me, very good news to me that Christ church had been maintained because all of a sudden, it went from the best I could do was the opinion of one good well-educated man against the opinion of another good well-educated man, have no criteria by which to know for sure which one was true. And all of a sudden, it’s like, “Wow, this church has maintained itself for 2,000 years.” And there are controversies, and there are conflicts, and there are problems, and there’s sin, and there’s corruption, whatever. But it’s still been maintained.
That’s astounding. I love history. I know of nothing similar in all of history. And so I try to address the joyful side of it as well. And I think another aspect is just I try to tell Protestants, “Look, I get where you’re coming from, this was shocking to me too. But here’s the price that you must pay for your Protestantism.” Intellectually, as I was saying with this Protestantism, Mormonism problem, if you want to be Protestant, if you want to reject, for example, those three doctrines I said: baptism or generation, apostolic succession and sacrifice of the Eucharist, you have to realize that you’re literally contrary to every single Christian of which we have any record prior to Martin Luther essentially.
And if that’s what you want to do, fine. But like me, most Protestants don’t realize that that’s literally the position they’re in because they’re not familiar with the history of the church. So I think many people of goodwill, when they hear that and they realize that, they don’t want to be prideful. I’ve had many Protestant friends convert. Most of my family’s converted now. It’s been wonderful. And they don’t want to go against… Who are they [inaudible 00:40:17]? The true gospel wasn’t available until the 1500s. Who are they? Who is Luther? Who is Calvin?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. That’s a wonderful point that you do have to remember that people of goodwill want the truth.
Joshua Charles:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
And they want to live in the truth. That’s a wonderful point. Joshua Charles, I’m so glad for this association that we got to have this chance to interview you. I hope it will be a long association with you.
Joshua Charles:
Yeah, absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
You’re doing wonderful work, and I’m very grateful for it. Thank you.
Joshua Charles:
Yeah. No. Thank you, Cy. Like I said, you’ve played a big role and so it’s an honor and a very humbling one to be able to talk with you.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. You should check out joshuatcharles.com to find his wonderful, wonderful writing. You can find him on Twitter @JoshuaTCharles. That’s not Twitter, by the way. That’s X. I’m sorry, I gave it the wrong title. We’re supposed to say X now. That about does it for us.
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