The gingerbread house-part 8

This is the final installment in my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018).

(Thomas Joseph White) the next semester I took a class on Early Christianity, thinking that if I studied the historical genesis of Christianity, I would figure out what it was at the beginning. In that class, we were exposed to authors like Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus and Augustine and Athanasius, including his important book On the Incarnation, and figures like John Chrysostom. As I read them, I had a rising instinct that whatever these authors were articulating, it was something very like Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, like what Newman means when he says that to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant (66).

What's striking about this is how, for him, the historical genesis of Christianity is subsequent to NT times. What it was like "at the beginning" means after it changed hands from the apostles and contemporaries of Jesus to the church fathers. He doesn't begin with the NT, or the OT, to see how NT faith is rooted in the OT. 

(Matthew Schmitz) My faith is not shaken by what the pope [Francis] is doing, though I have a very negative view of it. Many would say the pope isn't compromising the Church's teaching on marriage. I don't think that. I think the pope's doing it, and that if he fully and finally succeeded, the Church would be shattered. The Catholic faith would be falsified…If one were prepared to become Catholic before but not after the regrettable events of  2016, one should have given up on the Church much earlier (127). 

A convert with a tipping-point. We'll see if he follows through on that.