Rome Sweet Home

by Kimberly Hahn

  I had already shown my parishioners that the one and only place where Christ used the word “covenant” was when he instituted the Eucharist, or communion, as we called it. Yet we only took communion four times a year. At first, it sounded foreign to all of us, but I submitted the proposal of weekly communion to the ruling elders.

  One of them questioned me, “Scott, don’t you think that celebrating communion every week might make it too much of a routine? After all, familiarity might breed contempt.”

  “Dick, we’ve seen how communion represents the renewal of our covenant with Christ, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, let me ask you this. Do you prefet to renew your marriage covenant with your wife only four times a year? After all, it might become mere routine, and familiarity might breed contempt.”

  He laughed heartily, “I get your point.”

  Weekly communion was unanimously approved. We even began referring to it as the Eucharist (eucharistia), borrowing from the usage of the New Testament Greek and the early Church.

  Celebrating communion each week became the high point of our church’s worship service. It also changed our Life as a congregation. We started having a potluck lunch after the service for fellowship, to discuss the sermon and to share prayer concerns. We began to practice communion and to live it as well. It was exciting. It brought a real sense of worship and community.

  Next I took my parishioners through the Gospel of John, and, much to my shock, I discovered that the Gospel was loaded with sacramental imagery.

  During my study, I recalled a conversation I had had a couple of years before in seminary with a good friend. He came up to my wife and me one morning in the hall, and he said, “I have been studying liturgy. It’s exciting!”

  I remembered my response to George. “Nothing bores me as much as liturgy except sacraments.” That’s the way I was in seminary because liturgy and the sacraments were not the things we studied. They weren’t in our background; they weren’t what we read in the text; they weren’t things we were open to. But going through the Letter to the Hebrews and the Gospel of John made me see that liturgy and sacraments were an essential part of God’s family life.

  At this point, the detective story gradually became a horror story. All of a sudden, the Roman Catholic Church that I opposed seemed to be coming up with the right answer on one thing after another, much to my shock and dismay. After a number of instances, it got to be chilling.

  During the week, I was teaching Scripture at a private Christian high school. I was sharing all about the covenant as the family of God, and my students were eating it up. I explained the series of covenants that God had established with his people.

  I drew a time-line and showed how each covenant that God made was the way he went about fathering his family down through the ages. His covenant with Adam was a marriage; the covenant with Noah was a household; the covenant with Abraham was a tribe; the covenant with Moses made the twelve tribes into a national family; the covenant with David established Israel as a national kingdom family; while Christ made the New Covenant to be God’s worldwide or “catholic” (from the Greek, katholikos) family to include all nations, both Jews and Gentiles.

  They were so excited—it made sense out of the whole Bible.

  One student asked, “What would this worldwide family look like?”

  I drew a big pyramid on the board, explaining, “It would be like an extended family that covers the world, with different father figures at every level appointed by God to administer his love and his law to his children.”

  One of my Catholic students commented out loud, “That pyramid looks a lot like the Catholic Church, with the Pope at the top.”

  “Oh, no”, I quickly replied. “What I’m giving you is the antidote to Catholicism.” I really believed that, or at least I was trying to. “Besides, the Pope is a dictator; he’s not a father.”

  “But Pope means father.”

  “No, it doesn’t”, I was quick to correct.

  “Yes, it does”, a number of students chorused.

  Okay, so the Catholics got another thing right. I could admit it, though I was scared. Little did I know what was to follow.

  At lunch one of my sharper students came up to me. Representing a little cadre of students in the back corner, she announced, “We took a vote, and it’s unanimous: We think you’re going to become a Roman Catholic.”

  I laughed—rather nervously. “That’s crazy!” Chills ran up and down my spine. She smiled ever so smugly, folded her arms and went back to her seat.

  I was still stunned when I arrived home later that afternoon. I said to Kimberly, “You’ll never guess what Rebekah said today. She announced that a group of students took a vote and agreed that I’m going to become a Roman Catholic. Can you imagine anything so absurd?”

  I waited for Kimberly to laugh with me. She just looked at me dead-pan and said, “Well, are you?”

  I could not believe my ears! How could she think that I would betray the truth of Scripture and the Reformation with such ease? It felt like a dagger was being plunged into my back.

  I stammered, “How can you say that? What a betrayal of your confidence in me as a pastor and a teacher. Catholic?! I was weaned on the writings of Martin Luther. What do you mean?”

  “I used to think of you as very anti-Catholic and committed to the principles of the Reformation. But lately you’re talking so much about sacraments, liturgy, typology and Eucharist.”

  Then she added something I’ll never forget. “Sometimes I think you might be Luther in reverse.”

  Luther in reverse! I couldn’t say anything. I went into my study, locked the door, slunk down into my desk chair, shaking. Luther in reverse? I was dazed, bewildered and confused. I could be losing my soul! I could be losing the gospel! I had always wanted to be a slave to the Word of God—and I believed I was. But where was it leading me? Luther in reverse—the words kept reverberating in my brain.

  It was no longer merely theological speculation, just weeks before, Kimberly had given birth to our son, Michael. I’ll never forget the feeling of becoming a father for the first time. I looked at my child and realized that the life-giving power of the covenant was more than a theory.

  As I held him in my arms, I wondered, to what church will he belong, or his children and grandchildren? After all, I was pastoring a Presbyterian church that had split off from a splinter group (the Orthodox Presbyterian Church), which had in turn separated from another division (the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A.), all in this century! (We didn’t call ourselves the split P’s for nothing!)

  Raising my own family created within me a longing for the unity of God’s family, deeper than I had ever known before. For the sake of my family and his, I prayed that God would help me to believe, to live and to teach his Word, no matter the cost. I wanted to keep a completely open heart and mind to Sacred Scripture and the Holy Spirit and whatever sources would lead me to deeper insights into God’s Word.

  Meanwhile, I was also hired as a part-time instructor at a local Presbyterian seminary. The subject of my first class was the Gospel of John, on which I was also doing a sermon series at the church. In my studies, I was keeping a couple of chapters ahead of the series. When I got to the sixth chapter of the Gospel in my preparation, I spent weeks of careful study on the following verses (Jn 6:52-68):

  The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats thi
s bread will live for ever. . . .”

  After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him, Jesus said to the twelve; “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

  Immediately, I wondered about what my professors had taught me—and what I was preaching to my congregation—about the Eucharist being a mere symbol—a profound symbol, to be sure, but just a symbol.

  But after lots of prayer and study, I realized that Jesus could not have been speaking figuratively when he taught us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. The Jews in his audience would not have been outraged and scandalized by a mere symbol. Besides, if they had misunderstood Jesus to be speaking literally—when he meant his words to be taken figuratively—he could have easily clarified his point. In fact, since many disciples stopped following Jesus because of this teaching (v. 60), he would have been morally obliged to explain the saying in purely symbolic terms.

  But he never did. Nor did any Christian, for over one thousand years, ever deny the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. No wonder. So I did what any pastor or seminary professor would do if he wanted to keep his job. I promptly stopped my sermon series on the Gospel of John at the end of chapter 5 and basically skipped over chapter 6 in my classroom lectures.

  Although my parishioners and students were getting excited about the rest of my teaching, they were getting a sense that this was not historic, traditional Presbyterianism. I could not bring myself to tell them that what they were hearing—and responding so enthusiastically to—echoed ideas from Scripture that somehow, somewhere, the Catholic Church had discovered along the way.

  One evening, after hours of study, I stopped in the living room and announced to Kimberly that I didn’t think we were going to remain Presbyterians. I was so convinced from Scripture of the need to give higher priority to the sacraments and liturgy than the Presbyterian tradition gave them that I suggested we consider the Episcopal tradition.

  She slumped down in the armchair and started crying. “Scott, my father’s a Presbyterian minister. My uncle’s a Presbyterian minister. My brother’s preparing to be a Presbyterian minister. And you are a Presbyterian minister. I don’t want to stop being a Presbyterian.”

  She had made her point. But what she didn’t know was that I was hoping at the time that the trail could end in the Episcopal church, though I wasn’t sure, The class I taught on the Gospel of John had gone so well that they asked me to teach some more classes the following semester. In fact, they asked me to go full-time next term, and those classes went even better.

  In my Church history class, one of my better students (an ex-Catholic) made a presentation on the Council of Trent. Following the presentation, he posed a whopper-stopper question I’d never heard before.

  He said, “Professor Hahn, you’ve shown us that sola fide isn’t scriptural—how the battle cry of the Reformation is off-base when it comes to interpreting Paul, As you know, the other battle cry of the Reformation was sola scriptura: the Bible alone is our authority, rather than the Pope, Church councils or Tradition. Professor, where does the Bible teach that ‘Scripture alone’ is our sole authority?”

  I looked at him and broke into a cold sweat.

  I had never heard that question before. In seminary I bad a reputation for being a sort of socratic gadfly, always asking the toughest questions, but this one had never occurred to me.

  I said what any professor caught unprepared would say, “What a dumb question!” As soon as the words left my mouth, I stopped dead in my tracks, because I’d sworn that, as a teacher, I would never say those words.

  But the student was not intimidated—he knew it wasn’t a dumb question. He looked me right in the eyes and said, “Just give me a dumb answer.”

  I said, “First, we would go to Matthew 5:17. Then we would look at 2 Timothy 3:16-17, ‘All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.’ And we’d look at what Jesus says about tradition in Matthew 15.”

  His response was penetrating. “But Professor, Jesus wasn’t condemning all tradition in Matthew 15 but rather corrupt tradition. When 2 Timothy 3:16 says ‘all Scripture’, it doesn’t say that ‘only Scripture’ is profitable. Prayer, evangelizing and many other things are also essential. And what about 2 Thessalonians 2:15?”

  “Yeah, 2 Thessalonians 2:15”, I said weakly. “What does that say again?”

  “Paul tells the Thessalonians, ‘So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.’ ”

  I shot back, “You know, John, we’re straying from the topic. Let’s move on and I’ll share something on this next week.”

  I could tell he wasn’t satisfied. Neither was I. As I drove home on the beltway that night, I stared up at the stars and moaned, “Lord, what’s happening? Where does Scripture teach sola scriptura?”

  There were two pillars on which Protestants based their revolt against Rome:—one had already fallen, the other was shaking. I was scared.

  I studied all week long. I got nowhere. So I called some friends. I got no farther. Finally, I called two of the best theologians in America as well as some of my former professors.

  Those I consulted were shocked that I would raise such, a question. They were even more dismayed that I wasn’t satisfied with their answers.

  To one professor I said, “Maybe I’m suffering from amnesia, but somehow I’ve forgotten the simple reasons why we believe the Bible is our sole authority.”

  “Scott, what a dumb question!”

  “Just give me a dumb answer.”

  “Scott,” he responded, “you really can’t demonstrate sola scriptura from Scripture. The Bible doesn’t expressly declare that it is the Christian’s only authority. In other words, Scott, sola scriptura is essentially the historic confession of the Reformers, over and against the Catholic claim that it is Scripture plus the Church and Tradition. For us, then, it is a theological presupposition, our starting point rather than a proven conclusion.”

  Then he offered me the same Scripture texts I had given my student, and I gave him the same penetrating responses.

  “What more is there?” I wanted to know.

  “Scott, look at what the Catholic Church teaches! Obviously Catholic Tradition is wrong.”

  “Obviously, it’s wrong”, I agreed. “But where is the basic notion of tradition condemned? Further, what did Paul mean when he required the Thessalonians to hold fast to tradition, both written and oral?” I kept pushing. “Isn’t this ironic? We insist that Christians can believe only what the Bible teaches. But the Bible doesn’t teach that it is our only authority!”

  I asked another theologian, “What for you is the pillar and foundation of truth?”

  He said, “The Bible, of course!”

  “Then why does the Bible say in 1 Timothy 3:15 that the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth?”

  “You set me up, Scott!”

  “I’m the one who feels set up!”

  “But, Scott, which church?”

  “How many applicants for the job are there? I mean, how many churches even claim to be the pillar and foundation of truth?”

  “Does this mean you’re becoming Roman Catholic, Scott?”

  “I hope not.”

  I felt the ground shaking, as though somebody was pulling the carpet out from under my feet. This question was larger than all the others, and nobody had an answer.

  Shortly thereafter, the chairman of the board at the seminary approached me, to invite me, on behalf of the trustees, to accept a full-time position as dean of the seminary. This offer was based on the fact that my courses had gone so well and the students were excited.

  This was the job I dreamed of getting by the time I was fifty! And here it was being dropped in my lap at the
ripe old age of twenty-six. Though I couldn’t tell him why, I had to say no. When I went home that night, I had to tell my wife about the offer.

  “Kimberly, there is nothing in the world I would rather do than teach at the seminary level. But I want to know I am teaching the truth. For someday I will stand before Christ and give an account for what I have taught his people. It won’t be enough for me to hide behind my denomination and professors. I need to be able to look him right in the eyes and say, ‘Lord, I taught them whatever you taught me in your Word.’ And Kimberly, I am no longer sure what that is, and I can’t teach until I am.” Then I braced myself for her response.

  She graciously replied, “That’s what I respect so much about you, Scott. But this means we’ll have to trust the Lord to provide a job.” God bless her.

  This conversation led to another painful decision. I announced my resignation to the elders of Trinity Presbyterian Church.

  At this point, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I had to have integrity. I could not teach as a pastor until I had more clarity. Kimberly and I cast ourselves on the Lord and prayed to know the next step.

  All I knew was that I wanted to believe, understand, teach and love whatever God revealed in his Word.

  Kimberly:

  Our arrival in Virginia began what I would describe as “The Tale of Four Seasons”. We entered into a “summertime” of our dreams coming true. Scott was the minister at Trinity Presbyterian Church, teacher at Fairfax Christian School and, later that year, an instructor at Dominion Theological Institute. I was the pastor’s wife, which I had always hoped to be, and I was becoming a mother for the first time.

  Scott preached and taught, pouring out his heart after many hours of study and preparation, and I was delighted to sit under his teaching. We also made many new friends and were close to seminary friends who had just relocated nearby, which greatly helped our adjustment to the move.

  On December 4, 1982, Michael Scott was born. How be transformed our marriage! All of life had greater meaning because we wanted to share it with him. It was so exciting to have a little person to sing to, to pray with and to tell everything I could think of about the Lord. Residual selfishness, which Scott and I had not noticed in ourselves, challenged us day by day (and night by night), which in turn taught us more deeply about the Lord than ever before.