All Roads Lead to Rome

Michael Bird describes his faith journey with charming candor in this must-read post. I laughed my way through reading of the twists and turns.

My own journey has been full of even more twists and turns. By some inscrutable plan, I was raised as a doctrinally flunky United Methodist surrounded by saints rich in spiritual gifts, including the Pentecostal ones, only to discover Reformation theology through reading and Calvinist friends once at the university, the only ones among my friends who knew how to carry on a theological conversation.

But I came to Reformation theology through reading Bonhoeffer, Ellul, Daane, and Dooyeweerd, and the Reformed Journal back in the 1970s; later, through Giovanni Miegge’s Young Luther, Barth’s Romans (both commentaries), and then through the Reformers themselves, Luther, Calvin, Bucer, and Zwingli, in German, Latin, and French via instruction in Italian, while attending the Waldensian Seminary in Rome. Also in Rome, I fell in love with Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas, and came around to appreciating Zinzendorf and Wesley. Crossway Books, the authors who write for it, were not part of my formation.

Perhaps the best twist of all was learning to think theologically and philosophically at the same time. Here my teachers have been mostly Jewish: Fackenheim, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. I am now able to read from the whole sweep of Western philosophy with a sense of the inner connectedness of the whole. Still, I might have lost my ability to think as a believer without the help of still others, like Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Potok, and O’Connor.

In other words, though my cur vitae is longer and more winding than that of Michael, I am a catholic evangelical at least in the same core sense as he is [Michael calls himself an evangelical Catholic, but that's confusing, because members of a movement within Roman Catholicism call themselves evangelical Catholics). Theologically, I aspire to appropriate Augustinian, Lutheran, and Calvinian themes for today, but I don’t look to contemporary Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists for models overmuch, because I see a lot of people whitewashing theological and ecclesiastical tombs, rather than reading Augustine, Thomas, Luther, and Calvin with an open mind and open heart.

Furthermore, as Michael also hints at, it always remains possible to return to the biblical text and find a theology that is richer and more satisfying than that of all the theological schools combined. The one who doesn’t get this, gets nothing.

As much as I love theology, however, and as much as I feel it is the duty of a Christian intellectual to be a theological warrior, the saints that surround me in my life as a pastor have taught me over and over again what we all should know from first principles: that theology in the school sense saves no one but damns many, whereas the theological virtues – faith, hope, and love – these, indeed, abide forever.

Comments

[Justin (koavf)]

John,

And how did you end up as a Waldensian in particular (I assume through the Methodist connection)? How did you end up in Italy? Every answer creates more questions.

-JAK

[JohnFH]

Justin,

each of those questions has a different answer. Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. At some point I will tell the tale.

[Matt]

A theological system's greatest strength (providing communal unity) can often become it's great enemy (e.g., inward and closed-off thinking that isn't ultimately interested in getting back to the text).

There are all sorts of errors to be found in here, and it doesn't seem likely that's going to change anytime soon.

[JohnFH]

Your first paragraph, Matt, makes a lot of sense to me, but the second paragraph is obscure. What is the referent of "here"?