Recognizing the Church
A Personal Pilgrimage & the Discovery of Five Marks of the Church
by Thomas Howard
I was brought up in an Evangelical household. To say this is to say something good. My father was a layman, not a preacher; but he was a devoted and assiduous daily student of the Bible. He and my mother exist to this day in my imagination as the very icons of the godly man and woman. It was a wonderful thing—that sage, earnest, transparent, Bible-centered faith. I owe the fact that I am a believer today, and that my whole pilgrimage, steep and tortuous as it has been sometimes, has been towards the center, not away from it, to the faith and prayers and example of my father and mother.
I believe that I and my five brothers and sisters, all of whom, now, in our sixties, are Christians who want to follow the Lord wholly, would all testify to this godly influence of our parents. The household was a household suffused with the Bible. We sang hymns—daily—hundreds of them over the years, so that probably all six of us know scores of hymns by heart. We had family prayers twice a day, after breakfast and after supper. Our parents prayed with us at our bedside, the last thing at night. We all went to Sunday school and church regularly.
There is only one agenda in a fundamentalist Sunday school: the Bible. The Bible day in and day out, year in and year out. Flannelgraph lessons, sword drills, Scripture memory: Everything was focused directly on the Bible itself. I am grateful for every minute of this, now, 50 years later. Because of this, the whole of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, is ringing in my ears all the time. Hundreds of verses, in the language of the King James Version, are there, intact, in my memory. I hope that, if my memory fails and I lose my wits in my old age, perhaps these verses, from so long ago, will remain there and bring me solace.
The Christian believers among whom I grew up were very forthcoming about the faith. They spoke easily and informally about the Lord. When you were among them, you knew that you were among people of “like precious faith,” as St. Peter phrases it. Many of the guests in our household had been overseas missionaries, some of them interned in concentration camps by the Japanese during World War II. Our ears were full of stories of how God had been faithful in all sorts of human extremities. It would be hard to find a better ambiance, I think, than this good and trusty Evangelicalism of my youth.
The Pilgrimage BeginsBut I speak as one whose pilgrimage has led him from the world of Protestant Evangelicalism to the Roman Catholic Church. One way or another, all of us whose nurture has been in one of the sectors of Protestantism where the Bible is honored, where the gospel is preached without dissimulation, and where Jesus Christ is worshipped as God and Savior—all of us desire to be faithful to the ancient faith that we profess, and to be found obedient to the will of God. Certainly such fidelity and obedience have motivated us so far, and we want to be able to give an accounting of ourselves when it comes to our turn at the Divine Tribunal, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.
Why then, would anyone want to leave such a world? Was not that a rendering of the ancient faith almost without equal? Surely to leave it would be to go from great plenty out to famine and penury?
Of my own case, I would have to say that I did not want to leave it. Certainly I was restless as a young man, like all young men, and any grass across any fence tended to look very green. I did, out of mere curiosity, draw back from the little church of my parents and my childhood when I returned to my hometown after having graduated from college and put in my time in the army. I visited the local Presbyterian church, and the Methodist and the Lutheran and the Episcopalian.
Only this last one held any great attraction for me—I think it was a matter of aesthetics more than any other single factor. The Episcopal liturgy is the most elegant thing in the world, and this is to be attributed to their Prayer Book, which has since been supplanted by a modern translation, but which in 1960 was still the old Book of Common Prayer, with its matchless Shakespearean prose. Episcopal churches tend to be gothic, with stained glass and cool, dark interiors. Episcopal hymnody is virtually the best in the world, if we are speaking of a rich treasury of hymns drawn from the era of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, as well as from ancient Christendom. I was attracted by all of this. There was also a strange note of nostalgia in it, since I knew that my mother had been “saved” out of Episcopalianism into fundamentalism in about 1915, but that she still retained an undying love for Episcopal hymns and liturgy. Somehow that nostalgia had communicated itself to me.
The next step in my pilgrimage was made easy. I found myself teaching at a boys’ school in England, so this put me in the neighborhood of the Church of England. There is a robust Evangelical wing in this old church, so I did not have to “leave” anything. I could have all this and heaven too, so to speak. I was received into the Church of England in 1962 and found myself among the best crowd of all, I thought: Evangelicals who took the liturgy, and the atmosphere of Anglicanism, for granted. I loved it.
Thomas Howard taught for many years at St. John's Seminary College, the Roman Catholic seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. Among his many works are the books Christ the Tiger, Evangelical Is Not Enough, Lead Kindly Light, On Being Catholic, and The Secret of New York Revealed, and a videotape series of 13 lectures on "The Treasures of Catholicism" (all from Ignatius Press).
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