From Wheaton to Rome: Why Evangelicals become Roman Catholic

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2002 by McKnight, Scot

If John Michael's story is proto-typical, so also is Scott Hahn's.22 Hahn was a rough and tough kid who was about to be put in jail when he caught the wave of his life. A Young Life leader, named Jack, led him to see his problem; he confessed his sin and accepted Christ as his solution to his sinfulness. Hahn, liked John Michael, then became a rabid Bible student and sought to convert and convince, whichever was needed. He attended Grove City College, met and married his wife, Kimberly, and then went to Gordon-Conwell Seminary, graduated and then became a Presbyterian pastor. Theological issues, which he wrestled to the ground, eventually led to his conversion to Catholicism: these issues were the theme of the covenant (his life-long love), contraception, justification by faith alone, liturgy and the sacraments, the early Fathers, and eventually the clincher was sola scripture. In the process, he had a dramatic and lengthy debate with John Gerstner, a well-known Jonathan Edwards scholar, but the Protestant mind kept losing in Hahn's mental debates. His wife, however, remained unconvinced, and the rift created serious marital strife and loneliness. His own journey led to his eventual acceptance into the Roman Catholic Church. He is now a world-renowned speaker and teaches at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Over 100,000 of his personal conversion story tapes have been sold. After some time, his wife came alongside him and joined him in the Catholic communion. His story, told with compelling force, is tailored to meet the objections of evangelicals who, admittedly, have many gaps to leap in understanding what Catholicism is all about.23 If the styles of John Michael Talbot, Scott Hahn, and Tom Howard differ, the substance of the three remains constant and typical of evangelicals who convert to Catholicism.

I now take a stand next to the theory I have already published on how conversion, all conversion, takes place.24 That theory, which cannot be explained in this context except where absolutely necessary, will be used for our analysis of why evangelicals convert to Catholicism. As mentioned above, this study is an attempt to use recent scholarship on conversion to explain, in ways previously not noticed, a specific sort of conversion: why evangelicals become Catholic. In what follows it will be seen that the model of conversion proposed enables us to find a clear and consistent pattern for a phenomenon that is clearly on the rise.

IV. ANALYSIS OF EVANGELICAL CONVERTS TO CATHOLICISM

When we examine faith stories from the angle of sociological categories we run the risk of de-sacralizing faith. The categories I am using in this study are abstract, to be sure, but my intention is not to minimize the sacredness of religious conversion. Neither are these categories I use to understand conversion intended to criticize anyone's faith. I am an evangelical, but I appreciate and value the entire breadth of the Christian Church, including the Roman Catholic tradition with all its pimples. I do not think any of the evangelical converts mentioned above or below has done anything wrong, and I certainly do not think they have lost their faith, even if I differ theologically at many crucial points.25 From each of these converts evangelicalism has much to learn. Thomas Howard's theme is that evangelicalism is not enough, because it does not absorb the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church into its very bones. In many senses, he is right. Evangelicalism has it strengths and its weaknesses; one of its weaknesses is its decision to hack off nearly 1500 years of Church history (apart from a singular, and somewhat shut-eye glance at Augustine). Just one afternoon with Chesterton's biography of St. Thomas Aquinas will show that we evangelicals are missing someone of powerful significance; perhaps I should say two persons!