I spent the last few days at a men’s retreat in Nebraska. To a Californian, Nebraska is a peculiar state. It’s unrelentingly green and nearly flat. Low hills rise just enough to block distant vistas. You can’t see more than a couple of miles, at least in the part of the state where I was. Your view is truncated, which may be appropriate when trying to focus on the interior life.
It was supposed to be a silent retreat, but at one point one of the other retreatants recognized me and asked whether I had heard of the convert Alex Jones. I laughed and said I knew Alex. I said that Steve Ray had introduced him to me and credited me, very indirectly, with Alex’s conversion.
Twenty-some years ago, Alex was the pastor of an inner-city Pentecostal church. He was in the audience when I debated the now-deceased Dave Hunt, a virulent anti-Catholic. Hunt (see photo) wrote many badly-written books, about half of them against the Catholic faith. He and I were in the Detroit area, speaking before a large audience on the topic of whether the Catholic Church was the true Church.
Alex probably felt at home in the audience because most of the attendees were Protestants of various stripes, though there was a good representation of Catholics. I entered the hall not so much concerned about the imbalance within the audience but with the unpredictability of my debate opponent.
I had debated Hunt previously, on a live radio program. It proved to be a frustrating experience. His claims against the Church were so wild that one hardly could prepare for them. We went back and forth, historical claim versus historical counter-claim, for the better part of an hour. The Protestant host of the program gave Hunt the last word. Had I known better, I wouldn’t have stood for that, but at the time I didn’t know better.
In the last few seconds of the program, Hunt asked the listeners, “Why would you believe a church that counted Mussolini and Hitler as members in good standing?” And then we were off the air. But we were not off the phone. I complained to the host that this was a cheap shot. Hunt had saved one of his most ludicrous claims for last, and I was given no chance to rebut him. This was unfair to me and to the audience. The host seemed contrite, though not very.
For the later Detroit debate I was more insistent regarding format. I made sure that I would be the last to speak, and I was. I don’t remember the particulars of most of my remarks that evening—I’m not one to listen to recordings of myself, that being too depressing—but I have the sense that I had handled things adequately. At least I got to the end without making any off-the-wall comments. Those I left to Hunt, who made plenty of them.
Throughout the debate we argued about how the Bible should be understood. On which authorities should Christians rely to get the proper sense? My closing argument was that we should ask ourselves, “Who most likely got the story right? Who was more likely to have understood the sacred text the way the first Christians understood it?” Is it more likely that the Protestant Reformers, living in the sixteenth century, ended up with the proper understanding, or is it more likely that the Christian writers of the first, second, and third centuries had the true sense?
What about someone like Polycarp, who died in 156 at age 86 and was said by Jerome to have been a disciple of, and thus student of, John the Evangelist? Or what about Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred around 107? He too learned from John. We have writings from both Polycarp and Ignatius. Ditto for Clement of Rome, the fourth pope, who died around 99 and likely was the Clement mentioned by Paul in Philippians 4:3. Clement’s surviving letter to the Corinthians shows him exercising authority over the Church in that distant city: a papal prerogative.
We don’t have many writings from these three, but all their extant writings are suffused with a Catholic sense. That is true of the writings of their successors in the following centuries. These early writers all wrote as though they were Catholics—which, of course, is what they were.
I didn’t phrase my final debates remarks so starkly. I just asked the audience to consider which group—the Protestant Reformers or the Fathers of the Church—more likely got the story right. Are we, I asked my listeners, more likely to have a true account from people who themselves learned from people who had seen Christ or from people who came on the scene fifteen centuries later?
When Alex Jones and I were introduced to one another, he humbled me by saying that not a single argument I made during the course of the debate made him suspect that the Catholic Church might be right about anything, but he admitted that my closing words seemed a proper challenge. Why not look into these early Christian writers? Nothing to lose, thought Alex, since they too would prove to be Protestants or, at least, proto-Protestants.
Except that’s not what he discovered. He began a regular study of the Fathers of the Church, and he found, to his dismay, that they were the Fathers of the Catholic Church, not of any Protestant church. This was more than disconcerting. It was frightening because it suggested that the early Church was Catholic and that the true Church today would have to be the Catholic Church.
Alex didn’t back off from where his reading led him. After much study and prayer, he entered the Catholic Church, bringing much of his flock with him.
This article is reprinted with permission from our friends at Catholic Answers.
