By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition

By What Authority?  An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition.  By Mark Shea, Ignatius Press revised and updated edition, 2013.

 

Mark Shea is a Catholic writer who is particularly prominent in that community of Christian apologetics known as St. Blog’s.  Four of Mark Shea’s books have been previously reviewed here: Mary, Mother of the Son, Volumes I, II, and III (March, April, and May 2011), and The Heart of Catholic Prayer (November 2012).  Shea’s blog, Catholic and Enjoying It! can be found at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/.  Shea is as comfortable discussing matters of theology and Church history as he is with editorializing on current events and critiquing popular culture.  On Catholic and Enjoying It!, one is likely to find a post on the latest news about Pope Francis, followed by a comment about an underreported scandal in the U.S. government, followed by a clip from The Star Wars Holiday Special.   In addition to writing an lecturing, Shea has also worked as an actor for the EWTN series on G.K. Chesterton The Apostle of Common Sense, and has starred as Chesterton’s famous protagonist in the recent film adaptation of Manalive.

 

By What Authority? is Shea’s spiritual autobiography.  There are many roads to Rome, and Shea’s path begins with a decided absence of Christian faith in his youth.  He eventually became a Evangelical Christian at age twenty, and eventually learned that there were large gaps in his knowledge about Christian history.  The more he learned, the more he came to believe in the Catholic Church.  By What Authority? explains how he became the believer he is today.

 

“This is a book about a change of heart and mind.  Specifically, it is a book about how an Evangelical who believed the Holy Scriptures to be the sole source of the Christian revelation came to discover and embrace the ancient Catholic teaching that Sacred Tradition is a source of revelation too.  It is written for those Catholics who wish to find a way to speak of the Faith to their Evangelical brothers and sisters that is not alienating but intelligible.  It is written for Catholics who wish to understand more clearly the very real impediments to faith an Evangelical often encounters when he thinks of the Catholic Faith.  Further, it is written for the Evangelical who wishes to confront that Faith and, in particular, its claim that the gospel is not fully expressed apart from Sacred Tradition.  And it is written for those, both Catholic and Evangelical, who seek to know how to speak to one another of their faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and come to a closer unity and love in the Holy Spirit, as our Lord commands us.”

 

Shea has a very confident and amiable prose style.  Like in his blog, Shea’s prose work blends cutting-edge scholarship with pop culture, creating a warm and approachable tone creating exactly the kind of atmosphere that someone who is interested in learning more about the Catholic faith would want to here.  Shea’s voice is erudite yet casual, and his book comes across more like a one-sided conversation with a warm-hearted friend than as a didactic lecture by a holier-than-thou figure.  

 

When explaining the reasons for writing his book, Shea writes:

 

“First, this book is an attempt to chart the course of a long journey that occurred in my soul.  To do this, I had two options.  I could tell the story in the chronological order of events, hoping that the reader would be able to make sense of the sprawling mess of intuitive leaps, backtracking, sudden storms of doubt, blank confusion, false leads, tedious hours of study, lucky breaks, prayer, and happenstance conversations that went into the turbulent process of thinking this issue through.  The problem with this approach is that it leaves the reader as confused in reading about my journey as I was in living it…

 

The second reason it is important to know where the author has been is because our culture is thoroughly dominated by the notion that “change” equals “repudiation of the past.”  Thus, not only is everyone from movie stars to political figures forever going through “phases,” but even in the Church we find people who assume that to change means to reject the past…

 

Don’t misunderstand.  I believe in the biblical demand for repentance and a decisive turning away from evil.  But this is not what we are talking about here.  Rather, we are talking about a typically modern mind-set that tends to identify “previous” with “bad, disproved, ridiculous, and rejected.”  It is this mind-set that I wish, paradoxically enough, to reject at the outset.  I emphatically do not think it necessary or desirable to repudiate my Evangelical roots in order to embrace Sacred Tradition.  Indeed, the Tradition I have come to regard as revelatory positively insists that God’s grace builds on, rather than repudiates, the good things in God’s good world– including the great good thing called Evangelicalism.”

 

It is important to realize that this is not a book that bashes Evangelical Christians.  On the contrary, Shea has and continues to have the greatest respect for those members of the Christian brethren, even though he now believes that relying solely on the Bible as a source of divine authority is an incomplete means of understanding one’s faith.  This book tells the story of how Shea learned the importance of Sacred Tradition, and realized that what he once thought were the foolish and utterly unnecessary trappings of the Catholic Church turned out to be the foundations of true understanding of Christianity.

 

“So before we talk about why I came to believe in the truth of Sacred Tradition, I believe it essential to count the core Evangelical growth rings on the tree of my Christian life and praise God for the good wood he gave me in my years as a Protestant.  Indeed, if what follows is to make sense, it can do so only in light of what God gave me through the first Christian community to which Christ called me after a life of fuzzy agnosticism.  That community was Evangelical Christianity.  It was largely through Evangelicalism that I became a believer in Jesus Christ at the age of twenty.  Likewise, it was largely through Evangelicalism that the Holy Spirit laid all the groundwork for me to see and embrace Sacred Tradition as revelation.” 

 

The book has a new conclusion, providing short glimpses into Shea’s life as an apologetic in the seventeen years since the book’s original publication.  A considerable portion of the conclusion is devoted to Shea’s attempts to counteract the misinformation campaign about the history of Christianity found in the novel The Da Vinci Code and the movie based upon the book.  Shea describes an event where a panel of Christians attempted to refute the false assertions and outright lies found in Brown’s work.  Many of the Evangelicals on the panel were at a loss to deal with the thorough pseudohistory found in the narrative, but Shea found that his extensive knowledge of the true history of the Church proved to be extraordinarily helpful in explaining that the alleged revelations that could destroy the Church were nothing more fictions divorced from historical reality.

 

There are twin emotions that tend to run inside Shea’s work: thankful joy and righteous anger.  There is much of the former and little of the latter in By What Authority?  It is a book about a man who has found both happiness and truth, and seeks to share in his good fortune by writing a book and sharing it with other people to help them grow in their faith and knowledge.  Knowledge is power, and it seems that knowledge about the history and traditions of Christianity is a kind of power that does not corrupt, but instead does exactly the opposite.

 

 

–Chris Chan