June 22
Dr. Jay Budziszewski
former Episcopalian
Posted on 06/22/2009 11:45:02 AM PDT by NYer
June 22
Dr. Jay Budziszewski
former Episcopalian
During the 1990s, J. Budziszewski rose to prominence as one of the leading intellectual lights among Evangelical Christians in America. A political theorist with a special interest in the natural-law tradition, he was highly sought as a speaker at conferences organized by groups such as the InterVarsity Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ. A principal theme of his many talks to American campus groups is captured in the title of his 1999 book, How to Stay Christian in College.
For some Evangelical Protestants, then, it came as a jolt when, on Easter Sunday 2004, Budziszewski was received into the Catholic Church. After maintaining a public silence about his conversion for several months, Budziszewski agreed to tell the story to CWR.
J. Budziszewski teaches in the departments of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recently books are What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide (Spence, 2004) and The Revenge of Conscience (Spence, 2004).
Q: Could you tell us something about your background–your education, particularly?
J. Budziszewski: I was born in Milwaukee, where I lived until age 13. My adolescence was spent on the east coast of central Florida, near the Space Center. In 1970 I began studies at the University of Chicago, choosing it partly because of its biopsychology program (which in fact I never entered) and partly because of its reputation as a hive of left-wing activity. Intellectually I was obsessed with mind-body problems; politically I was far to the left. After one year of college I married my high school sweetheart; after another year we moved back to Florida. In those days I viewed places like the University of Chicago as aquaria for the children of privilege. It seemed to me that a good socialist should get out of there, learn a trade, and join the proletariat, so I learned welding. I worked a variety of jobs as a welder, ending up at the Tampa shipyards.
What I discovered during that period was that I belonged in college after all. Needless to say, there was no such thing as a "proletarian" university, but I thought I could stomach a public university, so I earned my BA at the University of South Florida, there in Tampa. After that I obtained an MA at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. Somewhere along the line I must have lost my prejudice against aquaria for the children of privilege, because I did my doctoral work at Yale University. Since finishing my PhD in 1981, I’ve been teaching at the University of Texas.
Q: So when you were at the University of Chicago, you were not studying in your current field of political theory?
Budziszewski: No, not then. My radicalism drew me into a political science major, but I didn’t even know there was such a thing as "political theory;" that discovery didn’t come until much later. It seemed to my young self that revolutionaries need to know about a lot of different things–political science, sociology, economics–and the political science major was more generous about such electives than those other majors were.
Q: And what about your religious background?
Budziszewski: My birth family was Baptist; in fact my maternal grandfather was one of the first Polish Baptist ministers in the United States. He pastored a Polish-speaking congregation.
I was a convinced Protestant. At the age of 10, I "walked the aisle," presented myself for Baptism, and vowed to follow Christ. Probably the best description of my spiritual condition during adolescence is "pious, but not holy."
In college, I abandoned my faith utterly: first faith in Christ, then belief in God, then belief in a real right and wrong. It wasn’t until after I had finished my education and had been teaching for a year or two that God drew me back to my abandoned Christian faith.
When I came back, though, I came back not as a Baptist but as an Anglican. I still wanted one foot in the Reformation, but I wanted another foot in Catholic tradition.
Q: Was your interest in the Catholic tradition part of the process that led you back to Christianity? Or, if we could put it another way, was your return to your Christian roots part of the overall journey that eventually led you to the Catholic Church?
Budziszewski: Although the seeds took another 20 years to sprout, Catholic friends and thinkers had influenced me even during my wilderness years of atheism.
I ought to explain that during those wilderness years, I was a practical atheist. I was never a theoretical atheist; I wasn’t quite fool enough to think that I could prove that there isn’t a God. What I thought was that there wasn’t any God who could make a difference.
Similarly, I was a practical nihilist. I wasn’t quite fool enough to think that I could prove that there isn’t a real difference between good and evil. What I thought was that the difference couldn’t make a difference. You see, I denied free will. I reasoned that if the mind is enchained, then we can’t have any confidence that any of our reasoning about good and evil has validity. For practical purposes, they would have to be viewed as human constructs.
Of course, the hole in that line of thought is large enough to drive a truck through. If I couldn’t have any confidence in my reasoning about good and evil, why should I have any confidence in my reasoning about having no basis for confidence? Why should nihilism make any more sense than morality? I papered that problem over with clever talk about taking an ironic view of reality.
But I was going to tell you the Catholic influences that worked on me during my wilderness years. I read St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and especially Dante Alighieri. When I read Dante’s imaginative description of the center of Hell–the Lake of Cocytus, where the damned are imprisoned in ice, unable to move a muscle to the right or to the left–I thought that he was describing me. I couldn’t move either. I’d thrown out all possible motives for movement.
Naturally I taught my students Thomas Aquinas, but I found it difficult to do so. The problem was that his arguments presented such a strong appearance of truth. For the very beauty of this appearance, I had to exercise strong discipline not to weep. One of my students in those days asked permission to put a personal question. "I’ve been listening carefully," he said, "and I figure that you’re either an atheist or a Roman Catholic. Which one is it?"
You can see why, when I finally returned to Christian faith, I wanted that one foot in Catholic tradition.
Yet return also meant recovery of lost elements of Protestant belief, and I couldn’t see my way to Catholicism proper.
I had the common Protestant idea that Catholicism teaches "works-righteousness"–that we earn our way into heaven, apart from the merits of Christ–that if we just earn enough "virtue points," we’re in. It took a long time to get over such misunderstandings.
Q: Thus far we’ve been talking about the intellectual origins of your return to the faith….
Budziszewski: When you speak of "intellectual origins," you’d better put scare quotes around the phrase. For several years after returning to the faith, it disturbed me that I wasn’t able to give a coherent intellectual account of why I had done so. That came much later.
What actually led me back was a growing intuition that my condition was objectively evil. I didn’t believe in objective evil, so that seemed to make no sense. But the intuition became so strong that I could no longer ignore it. It wasn’t a "feeling." I was forced to regard it as a perception of truth.
At this point I suppose intellect does come in, because I was familiar with Augustine’s argument about evil. Evil is deficiency in good; there is no such thing as an evil "substance," an evil-in-itself. So if my condition really was evil, there had to be some good of which my condition was the ruination. And if there really were both good and evil, then I had been so wrong, for so long, so profoundly, that it seemed that almost anything might be true–even the faith that I had abandoned.
So I began studying all those Christian things I had forgotten. There was no distinct moment in time at which I could have said, "I believe, but a moment ago I didn’t." One day, though, I realized that without having noticed it, I had been believing for some time.
But if the Christian revelation about Jesus Christ is true, then it makes no sense to do anything else except to follow him. So we took up the life of faith again, both of us. My wife never had lost her faith as totally as I had; you might say that her faith had gone into remission. She had compartmentalized Christian belief, allowing her life to be guided by other beliefs that were incompatible with it. But although her path back to faith was somewhat different from mine, she too was ready to return.
Q: And upon your return you were an Anglican; what prompted you to move on from that point?
Budziszewski: The first push was the discovery that Anglicanism was dying and all but dead. When my wife and I resumed Christian worship, we assumed that the reason the congregation recited the Nicene Creed together was that they all believed it. After years of self-imposed exile, this was indescribably wonderful. The "cloud of witnesses" of which St. Paul speaks was almost palpable; we felt that you could reach out and touch those millions of Christians from bygone generations.
Then came the day when the college chaplain, who happened to be giving the homily that day, announced to the congregation that he "was no longer able" to believe in the Resurrection. I wanted to ask, "What happened to your vows?" and "How dare you continue to call yourself a priest?" But I merely asked, "I see you every week, reciting the Nicene Creed like the rest of us. If you don’t believe it, how can you?"
He responded, "I do it as an act of solidarity with the community." In other words, it meant nothing at all. I came to realize that this was true for a great many Episcopal priests. The principle of doctrinal education in our parish was "anything goes"–that is, anything but historic Christian doctrine. If you stood up for Holy Scripture and Apostolic Tradition you would quickly find yourself on the outs.
The question we faced was whether it would be more pleasing to God to get out of the Episcopal communion altogether, or stay behind as a "faithful remnant."
Q: Was that the point of your departure from Anglicanism, then?
Budziszewski: No, not yet. Instead we transferred our membership to another Episcopal parish where it seemed that historic Christian doctrine was still taught. We remained in that parish for years, and still bear a deep love for the people we knew there.
But the ongoing collapse of the Episcopal enterprise forced us to ask deeper questions about the nature of the Church. Our ecclesiology was very nearly Catholic, long before we actually joined the Catholic Church. This fact made our picture of ourselves as part of a "faithful remnant" inside the Anglican communion harder and harder to believe in. After all, if what the Catholic Church teaches about her nature and authority is true, then how can you justify not becoming part of her?
Although we continued to disagree with a number of Catholic dogmas, we suffered a growing suspicion that where we disagreed, it was we who were wrong, not the Church.
Not all converts come into the fold in the same way. For some people on the way into the Catholic Church, the ecclesiastical objection is the last one to be overcome. First they become convinced about doctrine A, doctrine B, and doctrine C, and then at last they becoming convinced that the Church has authority to teach about these matters. For me it was the other way around. First I became convinced that the Church has authority to teach. That didn’t mean that my various difficulties about doctrine A, doctrine B, and doctrine C disappeared, but it converted my "objections" into "obstacles."
After several years of wrestling, becoming convinced on one point after another, I finally found myself able to say with respect to the remaining issues, "I am ready to obey." That turned out to be crucial. As Augustine said, we believe in order to know. There are some things you have to understand before you can accept them–but there are others you have to accept before you can understand them.
Q: How long did that whole process take?
Budziszewski: Much too long. About eight years, ending in 2003. We made God wait.
The last three of those years were really difficult. My wife and I had not yet reached that point of obedience. We were still in "faithful remnant" mode. In a sort of a compromise–which, in retrospect, seems rather unsatisfactory–we decided that if the Episcopal church ever came to incorporate the prevalent abominations into its canons, that would be our signal to get out.
The signal we were waiting for came unmistakably during the summer of 2003. It was bad enough that the Episcopal general convention ordained as bishop a man who had abandoned his wife and children in order to live in sin with another man. That might have been viewed as an aberration. Much worse was the fact that the general convention authorized drawing up rites for the blessing of same-sex unions. That converted the aberration into a rule.
But the signal turned out to have been unnecessary, because we had already crossed our Rubicon. That summer, we visited an Episcopal church in another town. No sooner had we entered than we encountered a "tract table" offering visitors free pro-abortion bumper stickers bearing the Episcopal shield.
That was the last straw. We knew that we could never consider ourselves members of the Episcopal Church again.
Ping!
The signal we were waiting for came unmistakably during the summer of 2003. It was bad enough that the Episcopal general convention ordained as bishop a man who had abandoned his wife and children in order to live in sin with another man. That might have been viewed as an aberration. Much worse was the fact that the general convention authorized drawing up rites for the blessing of same-sex unions. That converted the aberration into a rule.
The exact impetus for our final decision to cross the Tiber. Word for word.
I am a huge fan of this man. His “What We Can’t Not Know” is a must read.
Isn’t he the columnist “Dr. Theophilus,” or something like that, for the “Boundless” website?
Yup!
Great stories of his adolescence and the deterioration of his faith.
Sounds like a great book!
Cardinal says Catholics humbled by Anglicans' decision to join church
Catholic convert from Oregon coast becomes a priest (former Evangelical)
EWTN - The Journey Home - June 15, 2009 - Marcus interviews a Muslim convert [Talat Strokirk]
(All Saints) Sisters Doing It For Themselves (Anglican House converting en masse)
Journey Home to the Catholic Church: I Have Jumped into the Tiber to Swim Across (UK minister, Fr. Jeffrey Steel )
EWTN - Journey Home - June 8, 2009 at 8pm - Fr. Jay Toborowsky, Jewish convert
EWTN - Monday 8pm - Journey Home - Jerry & Yolanda Cleffi (former Assembly of God)
Exclusive: Newt Gingrich Opens Up on Catholic Conversion and Embracing 'Overt Christianity'
Mom’s Gift From Pope [Heidi Sierras]
The Journey Home - April 27 @ 8pm - Doug Grandon former Episcopal clergyman
EWTN - The Journey Home - April 20 - Msgr. Keith Barltrop, former Baptist
Journey Home - Monday April 6 - Kenneth Howell, Former Presbyterian minister Newt Gingrich on his conversion to Catholicism
Gingrich Keeps Quiet on Catholic Conversion (received into Church over the past weekend)
Exclusive: Newt Gingrich conversion details; plans release of JP2 documentary
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Catholic Church prepares for tens of thousands of U.S. converts
Gingrich to Become Catholic During Easter Season
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Former Episcopal bishop discusses his new life as Catholic priest [Father Jeffrey N. Steenson]
The Newt Evangelization: Gingrich to become Catholic
Conservative Episcopal bishop resigned to become Roman Catholic priest (New Mexico) Rev. Jeffrey Steenson
Converted Muslim Tells Story Behind Papal Baptism
EWTN - The Journey Home - December 1 - Dr. Steven C. Smith (former Willow Creek)
Former Socialist senator who converted to Catholicism calls for end to abortion [Mercedes Aroz]
Young New Yorker leaves police force to become priest [Nicholas Fernandez]
Interesting Deathbed Converts
Hollywood screenwriter returns to Cleveland, turns life over to God [Joe Eszterhas]
A Journey in Prayer {Randy Hain} [Ecumenical]
ECUMENIC] Our Conversion Experience (SDA to Catholic) [Brandon and Tara Ogden]
An open letter to Mr. Stephen A. Baldwin, Actor, and “born again” Christian [ Victor R. Claveau, MJ "
Sick person who suffered accident recounts conversion after traveling to Lourdes [Ecumenical] [Antonio Escobedo Garcia]
Welcome Home! Anglo-Catholic Sisters on the Road to Rome [Ecumenical]
Former Anglican Bishop, Catholic Convert, Jeffrey Steenson on Anglocatholicism [Ecumenical]
Jeffrey Steenson: Why I Became Catholic [Address to Anglican Use Conference]
Tony Snow Dead at 53, A Tribute to a Catholic Journalist [Tony Snow - Catholic Convert]
A Sexual Revolution (One woman's journey from pro-choice atheist to pro-life Catholic) [Jennifer Fulwiler]
C of E bishop will defect to Rome
Assyrian bishop explains his journey into communion with the Catholic Church
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Journey Home - EWTN at 8pm - Dr. William Bales, former Presbyterian Minister [Ecumenical]
First the Protestants, Now the Cults: Will We (the Catholic Church) Be Ready? [Open]
Six Million African Muslims Convert to Christianity Each Year [OPEN]
EWTN - The Journey Home - May 19 - Tom Cabeen, former Jehovah's Witness [Ecumenic]
A TRIUMPH AND A TRAGEDY [James Akin]
Alex Jones: the evangelical who became a Catholic deacon
Mary and the Problem of Christian Unity [Kenneth J. Howell, Ph. D.}
How the Saints Helped Lead Me Home [Chris Findley]
Who is Mary of Nazareth? [Kenneth J. Howell, Ph. D.}
A story of conversion at the Lamb of God Shrine
EWTN - Journey Home - 4/7/08 - Rosalind Moss - Former Jew & Evangelical Christian
Our Lady’s Gentle Call to Peace [Joan Tussing]
Coming Out of Sodom (Reversion Experience of Once-Active Homosexual) [Eric Hess]
Our Journey Home [Larry and Joetta Lewis]
Book on Mary turns runaway youngster immersed in drugs and crime into a priest
Dr. Robert C. Koons (former Lutheran) - Journey Home - Monday 3/31 - Conversion Story
The Story of a Convert from Islam – Baptized by the Pope at St. Peter's [Magdi Cristiano Allam]
How Do We Know It’s the True Church? - Twelve Things to Look For [Fr. Dwight Longenecker]
"Have you not read?" The Authority behind Biblical Interpretation [Robert Sungenis]
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New faith pulls Hot Springs family together (Baptists join Catholic Church at Easter Vigil) [Danny Morrison and family
SciFi Writer, John C. Wright, Enters Catholic Church at Easter Vigil (conversion story)[John C. Wright]
"What is Truth?" An Examination of Sola Scriptura [Dwight Longenecker’family]
LOGIC AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF PROTESTANTISM [Fr. Brian Harrison]
Pope baptizes prominent Italian Muslim [Magdi Allam]
My Journey of Faith [Marco Fallon]
My (Imminent) Reception into the Roman Catholic Church [Robert Koons]
Thousands in U.S. to Join (Catholic) Church - Many Feel They Have Found a Home
TURN ABOUT (Carl Olson, former Evangelical and Monday's guest on EWTN's Journey Home)
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All Roads Lead To Rome (A Southern Baptist's Journey into the Catholic Church)[John David Young]
Allen Hunt, Methodist Minister ...Journeys Home (Catholic, Re: Real Presence)/a>
The Challenges and Graces of Conversion [Chris Findley]
An Open Letter...from Bishop John Lipscomb [Another TEC Bishop Goes Papist]
Unlocking the Convert's Heart [Marcus Grodi]
His Open Arms Welcomed Me [ Paul Thigpen}
Why I'm Catholic (Sola Scriptura leads atheist to Catholic Church)
From Calvinist to Catholic (another powerful conversion story) Rodney Beason
Good-bye To All That (Another Episcopalian gets ready to swim the Tiber)
Bp. Steenson's Letter to his clergy on his conversion to the Catholic Church
Bishop Steenson’s Statement to the House [of Bishops: Episcopal (TEC) to Catholic]
Bp. Steenson's Letter to his clergy on his conversion to the Catholic Church
Bishop Steenson Will Become a Roman Catholic
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Why I Returned to the Catholic Church. Part VI: The Biblical Reality (Al Kresta)
Why I Returned to the Catholic Church. Part V: The Catholics and the Pope(Al Kresta)
The Hail Mary of a Protestant (A true story)
Why I Returned to the Catholic Church. Part IV: Crucifix and Altar(Al Kresta)
Why I Returned to the Catholic Church. Part III: Tradition and Church (Al Kresta)
Why I Returned to the Catholic Church. Part II: Doubts (Al Kresta)
Conversion Story - Rusty Tisdale (former Pentecostal)
Why I Returned to the Catholic Church. Part I: Darkness(Al Kresta)
Conversion Story - Matt Enloe (former Baptist) [prepare to be amazed!]
THE ORTHODOX REVIVAL IN RUSSIA
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Conversion Story - John Weidner (former Evangelical)
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Journey Home - May 21 - Neil Babcox (former Presbyterian) - A minister encounters Mary
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My (Imminent) Reception into the Roman Catholic Church
A Convert's Pilgrimage [Christopher Cuddy]
From Pastor to Parishioner: My Love for Christ Led Me Home (to the Catholic Church) [Drake McCalister]
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laetare (commentary on ordination of married Anglican convert to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles) Father Bill Lowe
Catholic Converts - Stephen K. Ray (former Evangelical)
Catholic Converts - Malcolm Muggeridge
Catholic Converts - Richard John Neuhaus
Catholic Converts - Avery Cardinal Dulles
Catholic Converts - Israel (Eugenio) Zolli - Chief Rabbi of Rome
Catholic Converts - Robert H. Bork , American Jurist (Catholic Caucus)
Catholic Converts - Marcus Grodi
He Was an Evangelical Christian Until He Read Aquinas [Rob Evans]
The Scott Hahn Conversion Story
FORMER PENTECOSTAL RELATES MIRACLE THAT OCCURRED WITH THE PRECIOUS BLOOD
Interview with Roy Schoeman - A Jewish Convert
Church Is Still Attracting Converts [Jim Anderson]
He has a very logical presentation. I like that!
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