In an interview celebrating the legendary friendship of J.R.R. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, and C.S. Lewis, evangelicalism’s “patron saint,” British author Colin Duriez describes what Lewis learned from Tolkien:

[Tolkien showed him that] “the nourishment he had always received from great myths and fantasy stories was a taste of that greatest, truest story– of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ… Lewis learned [from Tolkien] how to communicate Christian faith in imaginative writing. The results were Narnia, the space trilogy, The Great Divorce, and so forth.”

This summer, my wife, daughter, and her fiancé celebrated the lives of two other special people: favorite aunts who were great in their own right. A memorial service for one and then, the next day, a 90^th birthday for the other brought our extended family together for a rare reunion. Amidst many precious interactions, I spent thirty minutes with my cousin’s family who are devout Catholics. Their kids are similar ages to mine, and it was a delight to get to know them and see just how much we shared—a love for fishing, the arts, favorite bands like Switchfoot, favorite movies like A River Runs Through It, and especially a faith that permeates our lives.

In the great hall of Christianity, I’m in one of the Presbyterian rooms within the larger Protestant corridor.  This isn’t because I’m better than others who have chosen other rooms. It’s simply because that’s where God has led me and it’s the best place I’ve found to carry out my faith with integrity.

Twenty-five years ago, at an evangelical Protestant seminary and overwhelmed by thousands of denominational possibilities, I longed for the comfort of dogma. At that time, a friend sent me a series of winsome and engaging lectures by Scott Hahn, a former Protestant pastor who became a Roman Catholic. I listened with an open mind and was surprised at how many of my Protestant perceptions of what Catholics believed were inaccurate, dated, or incomplete.  The historical authority of the Catholic Church was an attractive idea given the intellectual fatigue I was experiencing, trying to sort through difficult theological questions with only a Bible in hand.

In the end, I became both more settled in my Protestant roots and more respectful of my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters.

More settled—It was this statement by the late British theologian John Stott that brought rest to my evangelical angst:

“The true evangelical wants liberty and authority.  We want to ask questions, to think, to pry, to ponder.  We want to do all these things, but within a framework of submission to an ultimate authority.  But we’re asking questions about our authority: what does it mean and how does it apply?  So we experience an uneasy tension between liberty and authority.  I couldn’t find a lodging place in either Catholicism or liberalism, because one seems to major on authority with little room for liberty, while the other emphasizes liberty with very little room for authority.”[1]

More respectful—It was, and has since been, good and godly Catholics and their teaching on key matters that have bolstered my appreciation of their place in the great hall. Here are just four of the many ways Roman Catholics have blessed my life to date:

1. Catholics stress the importance of regular confession of sin to human beings (in their case, a priest), not just God. Protestants love to quote 1 Tim. 2:5 to say that we don’t need to confess our sins to a priest because we can go to directly to God. We are content to ignore, however, James 5:16, which says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” Catholics, even if one doesn’t agree with their confessional system, at least provide a safe place for the confession of sin to other caring human beings. In contrast, my childhood independent fundamentalist Baptist experience taught me to hide my faults, act as spiritual as possible, and judge others with problems.  There was no safe place or encouragement to be real with people. I now prioritize honest, safe one-on-one relationships, and in small groups. Yes, thank God, we can go directly to the Father through Jesus (1 Tim. 1:5; Heb. 4:16), but we still need to be real about our faults and struggles with appropriate, safe brothers or sisters—faithful friends—who serve us in a priestly role.
2. Catholic teaching helped me see the deeper reasons why pornography is wrong: it defaces the image of God and “does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others.”[2]
3. Catholics, unlike many Protestants, have had a consistent moral and public voice for the sanctity of marriage and family, and against abortion. I will not write more on the pro-life cause now as I have already done so recently; however, here is an honest and compelling Roman Catholic video clip on marriage.
4. Another example of rich Catholic cultural discernment can be seen in this incisive statement by former Pope Benedict XVI on the importance of fathers: “Human fatherhood gives us an anticipation of what God is. But when human fatherhood does not exist, when it is experienced only as a biological phenomenon without its human or spiritual dimensions, all statements about God the Father are empty. That is why the crisis of fatherhood we are living in today is an element, perhaps the most important, threatening man in his humanity.[3]

To all who may or may not have some “inkling” of what I’ve been talking about above, I close with this provocative observation from Protestant theologian Herman Bavinck:

“We must remind ourselves that the Catholic righteousness by good works is vastly preferable to a Protestant righteousness by good doctrine. At least righteousness by good works benefits one’s neighbor, whereas righteousness by good doctrine only produces lovelessness and pride. Furthermore, we must not blind ourselves to the tremendous faith, genuine repentance, complete surrender and fervent love for God and neighbor evident in the lives and work of many Catholic Christians.”[4]

[1] https://thirdway.hymnsam.co.uk/editions/no-edition/high-profile/life-in-the-spirit-of-truth.aspx

[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 565.

[3] Pope Benedict XVI cited from a speech given in Palermo, Italy in March 2000.

[4] Richard J. Mouw, Adventures in Evangelical Civility (Grand Rapids, MI: Bravos Press, 2016), 199.