Stunned by Scripture. Dr. John S. Bergsma, Ph.D.

My father was a U.S. Navy chaplain. In the U.S. military, chaplains have to be sponsored by a denomination. My father was sponsored by a Dutch Calvinist denomination to which our family had belonged for at least three generations. Dutch Calvinists usually call their churches “Reformed.”

      Not many people have heard of Dutch Calvinism, but most people have heard of Presbyterians. Presbyterians are also Calvinists, but they originated in Scotland and England. Dutch Calvinists, then, are like Presbyterians, only they came from Holland. So, imagine Presbyterians with wooden shoes and windmill cookies, and you have a pretty good picture of the faith-culture of my extended family.

      During my childhood, my father was transferred many times, as is typical of the Navy. I grew up in Hawaii, New Jersey, Virginia, Connecticut, California, and then back to Hawaii for high school. In high school, I was powerfully influenced by the youth pastor of the little Baptist church we attended near the Marine base where my father served. He took me aside, along with two other high school boys, and began to work with us in a relationship of personal discipleship. That fundamentally changed my understanding of the Christian faith and what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus. I have ever afterward remained convinced that personal discipleship is the only way to lasting growth and flourishing for individual Christians and the Church as a whole.

      At the end of my high school years, I chose to apply to college. That involved narrowing my career possibilities. Since I had done well in a wide range of academic subjects, there were a number of career paths open to me, from highly technical fields to performing arts. I prayed to God: “I don’t know what to choose. I feel like I could do anything!” I felt an inaudible answer come back from God: “If you think you can do anything, why not do what you are avoiding?”

      What I had been avoiding was pastoral ministry. I had long felt a tug to follow my father’s footsteps and become a preacher myself, if not a military chaplain. However, I didn’t consider myself a people-person, and many things about the pastoral vocation scared me. As a result, I had put the idea far on the back burner.

      When God’s voice in my heart pulled it back to the front and center, my college choices suddenly became radically simplified. I tossed out all the college applications to secular schools and just mailed in the one to our denominational college, which was the only path to becoming a preacher in the church my family belonged to.

      In the fall of 1989, I entered as a pre-seminary student at that school and finished in three years with a bachelor’s degree in Classical Languages (Greek and Latin). I was required to study Greek in order to read the New Testament in the original language, and I decided to pick up Latin along the way. In the process, I also met my future wife, Dawn, and we married in 1993, after I had completed one year of seminary.

      After a year or so, we found ourselves pregnant with our first son, and Dawn quit work to care for herself and the baby. That left it to me to provide for the family and go to school for the rest of my seminary career. With a degree in Classical Languages, my best chances of employment were probably in food service! However, I did have a license from the denomination to lead worship services, and it just so happened that the tiny innercity church we attended had just lost its pastor. Unable to afford a fully ordained minister, the church asked me to become the acting pastor, and I accepted at the amazing remuneration rate of $800 per month. Unbelievably, Dawn and I could afford to live on that in those days! Thus began the four-year stretch of urban ministry that was probably the most transformative experience of my life.

      As the acting pastor of an impoverished inner-city Dutch Calvinist church with a mixed congregation of Caucasians, Hispanics, and African-Americans, the challenges were unrelenting and often excruciating. At the same time, I encountered the reality of God in a direct and experiential way, more profoundly than anything previous in my experience. In so many ways that I did not realize at the time, God was using these four years of urban ministry to prepare me to enter into the Catholic Church. How could four years of ministry as a Protestant pastor drive one toward the Catholic Church? Oh, let me count the ways!

      Suffice it to say that after four years of inner-city ministry, I was really no longer a classic Protestant on the inside. I was very uncomfortable with certain Protestant theological tendencies, although I never would have described it like that. I didn’t realize at the time that my issue was with Protestantism per se; I just felt like I was somehow in the wrong form of Protestantism and needed to find a church that “had it all together doctrinally.”

      In any event, by this time I had reached the end of my seminary career, and it was time to graduate, be ordained, and begin a lifelong career for my denomination. The problem was that my theological confusion was causing me to be very hesitant about making a long-term commitment to my denomination. At the same time, I couldn’t continue as a part-time pastor at the small church I was serving, and I had no other job prospects. Plus, my family was growing with the recent addition of a third child.

      It’s pretty depressing to complete an eight-year program of schooling and then, at the end, find that you are not ready to step over the threshold and commit to the career you had worked so hard for. In fact, I got more than a little depressed, confused, and directionless. Being close to despair, I did something rash that many do when experiencing an emotional and psychological crisis: I applied to graduate school. I figured that another four years or so of schooling might buy me the time to straighten out my mind. So, I sent out applications to about a dozen schools that offered doctoral programs in Old Testament. The one that responded most enthusiastically was the University of Notre Dame.

      It’s a providential story how I even applied to that University in the first place. Essentially, I missed an exit off the freeway while returning from a weekend “mission” to Chicago with my teen youth group. I got off at another exit to turn around and found myself almost on the campus of Notre Dame (Exit 77 of the I-80/90 Indiana Toll Road). Surprised by this (I thought Notre Dame was in California), I decided to see if they offered a doctorate in Bible. Sure enough, a quick internet search a few days later revealed that they did, so I applied. South Bend, Indiana, offered an extremely low cost of living, and Notre Dame offered an extremely generous fellowship with stipend — so, with then-four kids and a wife to support, it was a no-brainer to accept Notre Dame’s offer and move my family two hours south to the Hoosier state.

      As providence would have it, one of the first persons I met at Notre Dame was Michael, a fellow graduate student in theology who had three qualities I never thought I’d find in one person: he was highly intelligent, filled with the Holy Spirit, and Catholic. Now, I’d met highly intelligent Catholics before, but they showed no presence of the Spirit in their lives and seemed to practice their faith — if at all — only to keep up appearances for their mothers, or something similar. I’d met highly-intelligent, Spirit-filled persons, but they were all Protestants. I’d met Spirit-filled Catholics before, but they all seemed like they were playing with fifty-one cards, and their elevator didn’t reach the top floor.

      But now there was this man in front of me whose Catholicism could not be dismissed as either a lack of devotion or a lack of intelligence. How could anyone with such evident love for Christ and extensive knowledge of theology remain in the Catholic Church? To say I was intrigued would be an understatement. I was fascinated, like someone sighting a UFO in broad daylight — or Moses staring at the burning bush, unable to understand how it was not consumed.

      I arranged to meet with Michael one day a week to talk theology over lunch. I really wanted to get to understand what made him tick and how he could have any kind of coherent worldview given what seemed to me, at least, his opposing commitments to Christ and to the Catholic Church. In particular, I wanted to know how he would respond to all my apologetic arguments against the Catholic Church, the ones I had used to good effect when evangelizing Catholics in the inner city. To my surprise, Michael responded to my apologetic attacks on the Catholic Church by citing Scripture. In fact, he carried a small Bible with him, and he knew how to use it. When we got into disagreements about doctrine, there were several occasions where Michael could show that the plain sense of Scripture better supported Catholicism!

      How ironic, I thought. Taking Scripture in its plain, literal sense was a major emphasis of Protestantism. Against the Catholic Church, we prided ourselves in direct obedience to