When Protestants Handle Debates Poorly

I'm not just referring to formal debates, though they're part of the problem. The bigger problem is how Protestants in general handle certain debates in general, whether formal or informal ones.

Protestants Should Make More Of An Issue Of Who We Pray To

One of Stand To Reason's podcasts took a question yesterday about prayer to saints. I've noticed for years that Protestants seldom bring the subject up on their own initiative, even though they should. They don't even address it defensively much, and they bring it up as evidence for Protestantism even less. There are multiple Biblical and multiple extrabiblical lines of evidence for praying only to God. For a collection of resources on the topic, see here.

Reformation Resources

Reformation Day is coming up soon. Several years ago, I put together a collection of posts about the historical roots of Evangelicalism and the Reformation. I periodically update the collection. I've added some posts on opposition to Roman Catholic teaching among the pre-Reformation Waldensians, here, here, and here. On the pre-Reformation Lollards, see here and here. And see the comments section of my collection of links on the papacy for some recent additions to those posts. I've also added entries on baptismal regeneration, the New Testament canon, the afterlife, and the perspicuity of scripture. I added new links to the entries on prayer to saints and angels and the eucharist.

When You're Deep In History And Have Ceased To Be Protestant

Robert Wilken is a historian who converted from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism decades ago. He's sometimes mentioned in lists of converts to Catholicism. He appeared on Marcus Grodi's television program "The Journey Home" on EWTN. You often find Catholic scholars making comments like these ones from Wilken's book on the first millennium of church history:

"As the controversy over the dating of the Pasch revealed, there was no central authority within Christianity in the second century. The Church was composed of a constellation of local communities spanning the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. They had a strong sense of unity among themselves, but they were only loosely organized." (The First Thousand Years [New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012], 39)

"In the early Church there was no 'private' confession. According to church law the emperor could not present himself quietly before the bishop, confess his sin, and receive absolution. The penitential discipline of the early Church was unremittingly harsh and carried out in front of the Christian people. The penitents were segregated from the rest of the community, assigned a special section in the church, and forbidden to receive the Eucharist." (135)

"By the middle of the third century the bishop of Rome had begun to acquire an unparalleled authority in the West - in Italy, North Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Not, however, in the East. There the churches looked to the bishops in the major cities, Alexandria in Egypt or Antioch in Syria. This geographical fact, that Rome was the principal city in the West, whereas in the East there were several, would lead to a quite different understanding of how the Church was to be governed at the highest level….It is clear from the minutes of the Council of Chalcedon that the bishops, most of whom were from the East, did not view Rome's authority as Leo [the Roman bishop] did." (165-66, 170)

"Apparently [in The Apostolic Tradition, a document of the third century] infant baptism was permissible - though not conventional - and parents or guardians would speak for the children." (176)

Focusing Too Much On The Patristic And Medieval Eras

One of the most popular criticisms of Protestantism, and one that seems to go a long way in convincing people, is the allegation that various Protestant beliefs were absent or not popular enough during the patristic and medieval eras. We're told that justification through baptism was widely accepted during that timeframe, for example, or we're even told that it was universally believed. Or look at how popular it was to pray to the saints and angels. Look at all of the agreement on such issues among the apostolic churches. And so on.

Protestants Aren't The Only Ones With Complicated Canonical Issues

Cameron Bertuzzi recently retweeted some comments from Josh Rasmussen on canonical issues and referred to how "this is a good [argument] for Catholicism". Keep in mind:

- The alleged ability of Catholicism to settle canonical issues in this context only addresses a portion of Catholicism's canon. That canon involves more than scripture. And Catholics continue to disagree with one another (and with non-Catholics) about what qualifies as tradition and what doesn't, which papal teachings are infallible, and so on. There's more agreement among Protestants about the canon of scripture than there is among Catholics about the canon of their rule of faith.

- Canons are complicated by their nature. That's not just true of scripture canons, but also of canons more broadly. People can dispute what documents were and weren't written by an ancient philosopher or a more recent individual, like Thomas Jefferson. If you broaden the canon to include all of the writings of a particular ancient school of philosophy or America's founding fathers in general, then the canonical issues will get even more complicated. How should the school of philosophy be defined? Who belongs to it and who doesn't? Who qualifies as one of America's founding fathers and who doesn't? Which documents attributed to George Washington were actually written by him? And so on. Since a canon of scripture in the Christian context involves multiple figures over a lengthy period of time (especially if you're including the Old Testament canon rather than limiting yourself to the New Testament), it involves the complexities that inherently go with a multi-author canon covering a longer rather than shorter timeframe. And there are other such factors that can make any given canon more or less complicated.

- Here's a series of posts I wrote about an Evangelical justification for the canon of scripture. We've written a lot more about the topic since then. You can find some archives of many of our relevant posts (not all of them) here and here. To summarize, the best explanation for what the relevant sources tell us about the apostles (e.g., Old Testament precedent, what Jesus said about the apostles, what the apostles said about themselves, what the other early Christian sources said about the apostles) is that they were communicating Divine revelation, including scripture. We have to make a probability judgment about whether a given document was part of that revelation, but the same is true of the alternatives (how probable it is that all of the sources supporting Jude's canonicity, for example, were wrong; the likelihood of Catholic arguments about the alleged authority of their denomination; whether it's probable that something that's claimed to be part of Catholic tradition actually is part of that tradition; etc.). It's not as though Protestants are the only ones who have a position to defend or the only ones relying on probability judgments about history. We have more evidence for the canonicity of 1 Corinthians than we have for the canonicity of Hebrews. But the evidence doesn't have to be equally good for every book, and a rejection of Hebrews has to be defended, just as an acceptance of it has to be. We've said a lot more about these and other canonical issues in the threads linked above. See my recent post here for a brief overview of how all of us (including atheists, for example) have to justify our own canons in many contexts in life and how those canonical issues are often complicated.

Protestants Aren't The Only Ones With Solas

To add to what I said in my last post, it's important that Protestants keep in mind that we aren't the only ones with solas. We use the sola terminology more explicitly and more often than others, but we aren't the only ones who accept such concepts. Every rule of faith has parameters. It includes some things while excluding others. It doesn't have to be sola scriptura in order to be sola something. So, if a Catholic, Orthodox, or somebody else wants to complain that he doesn't understand how sola scriptura works in some context, you can ask him if he understands how his own sola works in that context. If he claims that Protestants are being inconsistent by doing X while affirming sola scriptura, ask him if he's being inconsistent by doing X while affirming his own sola. It's often adequate to say, "Scripture is to me what your rule of faith is to you."

It's remarkable how large of a percentage of objections to Protestantism consist of the sort of inconsistencies on the part of the objector that I've been addressing in these last two posts. Take away those inconsistencies, and you take away a large percentage of what many critics of Protestantism consider their best objections.

Some past correspondences with Steve Hays

A longtime Triablogue reader and a friend of Steve Hays thought some of their past email correspondences might be beneficial for others to read. He granted us permission to post these correspondences. He preferred to be anonymous so I've edited and anonymized the content. Of course, "SH" refers to Steve Hays.

Schism

1. Catholic polemical theology stresses the grave sin of schism. But that's circular because schism in Catholic usage is basically a made-up category. And don't quote me NT passages that use the word "schism" in Greek, because that's a semantic fallacy. In ecclesiastical usage, "schism" is a technical term. NT Greek usage doesn't have that specialized meaning.

The NT does have two related categories: heresy and apostasy. The clearest NT example of schism are the heretics who broke away from St. John's congregations (1 John). But, of course, evangelicals don't think the Catholic church is comparable to John's congregations. If anything, it's the other way around. The Catholic church broke away from NT exemplars. 

2. Here's another problem with the traditional Catholic allegation that Protestant denominations are schismatic. Schismatic in relation to what? To the church of Rome? A basic problem with that comparison is that the church of Rome keeps reinventing itself. Even though Protestants broke away from the 16C church of Rome, that no longer exists. It isn't possible to reunite with the 16C church of Rome, even if that was desirable. The 16C church of Rome is radically different from the 21C church of Rome. The 1C church of Rome is very different from the 6C church of Rome. How can you be schismatic in relation to a "parent" denomination that's constantly changing? The church of Rome keeps mutating into something else. 

Of course, Catholic apologists insist that there's fundamental continuity, but that's only convincing to Catholic apologists and like-minded Catholics. 

"Protestantism is not a church"

I'm going to comment on something by an Eastern Orthodox apologist:

https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/orthodoxyandheterodoxy/2017/10/31/protestantism-not-united-not-catholic-not-church/

The EO/evangelical debate is underdeveloped on both sides compared to traditional debates like the Catholic/Protestant debate, the Calvinist/Arminian debate, &c., because evangelicalism wasn't a contender in the East while EO wasn't a contender in the west. So it's useful to engage EO arguments from time to since since that's the trail less taken. I won't comment on everything he says because some of his objections are identical to Catholic objections, and I've discussed those ad nauseam. 

He's interacting with a document called “Reforming Catholic Confession”. I might agree with some of his criticisms, but that just means I disagree with how the “Reforming Catholic Confession” frames certain issues. I can disagree with both of them: Eastern Orthodoxy and the “Reforming Catholic Confession” alike. 

30,000 denominations redux

I'd like to revisit a mindless but ever-popular Catholic trope about the Protestant faith. And that's the claim that sola scriptura spawned "30,000" denominations. The figures varies depending on the Catholic apologist. This is related to the Catholic objection that Protestants can't agree on anything. 

Here's why I say that's a mindless trope: if you think the Protestant movement is so disunited that it doesn't stand for anything, then why classify all these groups as Protestant? Put another way, if you can't say what the opposing position represents, then you have no target to aim at. 

If there's no such thing as a core Protestant theology, then there's nothing to critique. At best, a Catholic apologist could say the basic problem with the Protestant faith is that there is not Protestant faith. That would be catchy, and you could put it in one pithy sentence. 

But of course, Catholic apologists offer detailed critiques of Protestant theology. They write whole books on the subject. And Catholic attacks on the Protestant faith bear an uncanny family resemblance. 

In practice, a Catholic apologist takes one of two approaches. One line of attack is to critique generic Protestant theology. He attacks typical, representative Protestant doctrines. But that's a roundabout admission that Protestant faith does have a common, identifiable core theology.

The other line of attack is to pick a particular expression of the Protestant movement like Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, or Calvinists. Although these have distinctive positions that distinguish them from one another, they are representative Protestant schools of thought. 

So both in principle and practice, Catholic apologists think there are recognizable Protestant doctrines. If they didn't think that, they couldn't write entire books attacking the Protestant faith. 

Why I'm still Protestant

1. Let's begin with an admission. As a Protestant, it would be nice to have more theological clarity and certainty on some issues. It would be nice not having to sift through multiple interpretations of Scripture. It would be nice to have more evidence or direct evidence for some OT events. It would be nice to have more evidence for some books of the Protestant canon. The evidence for the Protestant canon is patchy in places. It would be nice to have more evidence for Jude and 2 Peter, or the Megillot (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther).

2. So why aren't I Roman Catholic? For one thing, I know too much about Roman Catholicism to mistake that for the solution. 

i) To take one example I just used, if I pick up a Protestant commentary, it sometimes reads like a multiple choice exam. The commentator will list several competing interpretations, then by process of elimination, explain why he thinks one interpretation is the best. But sometimes he will confess that it's hard to choose between two competing interpretations.

Guess what–when I pick up a Catholic commentary on the same book, by a scholar like Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, Jerome Quinn, or Luke Timothy Johnson, it's exactly the same process. They're in the same boat. 

ii) Take another example I used: where the Catholic canon happens to coincide with the Protestant canon, the evidence is uneven in all the same places. Thinner on some books and thicker on others. Catholics don't have an extra stash of evidence to bolster the less well-attested books. So that's no improvement. 

But they have an addition problem we don't, which is poor evidence for the Deuterocanonicals. In that regard, they're worse off that we are. 

BTW, does anyone seriously think that Tobit or Bel and the Dragon is the equal of Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, or Song of Songs? 

3. Now at this point a Catholic apologist will exclaim: That proves our point! Who decides? That's why the Magisterium is indispensable. 

But there are fundamental problems with that "solution":

i) It's an appeal to ersatz evidence. An artificial makeweight. Catholics have no additional evidence, so they invent an oracle to fill the gap. Yet Catholic apologists must resort to so much special pleading to defend the machinations and peregrinations of the papacy. To all appearances, the papacy behaves just like you'd expect an uninspired institution to behave. 

ii) The problem with asking "who decides" is that it only pushes the same question back a step: Who decides "who decides"? You decide who decides! A convert to Catholicism decided to make the Magisterium the decider. So the convert is the ultimate decider. 

4. God could make it easier to be a Protestant. But that's hardly a damaging admission. God could make it easier to be a Catholic. God could make it easier to be a Christian. Catholic and Protestant alike find themselves in situations where they crave greater clarity and certainty. Times when we wish we had more evidence. When you're going through an ordeal, or watching a loved one go through an ordeal, when your life hit rock bottom, wouldn't it be nice to have Jesus appear to you? Or have an angel appear to you? And some Christians experience that, but Christophanies and angelophanies are not a normal part of Christian experience. 

Wouldn't it be nice of God answered your prayers more often? Wouldn't it be nice if you could ask God a question and get an audible answer? But that rarely happens. Many lifelong Christians never have that experience. 

So you just have to muddle through. That's not unique to Protestants. Consider Catholic "saints" who complain about the dark night of the soul. God wasn't there for them. 

5. There's a sense in which charismatics and apostates or atheists have a Roman Catholic outlook, but they are more consistent than Catholics. They take it to the next step.

A charismatic expects that God will give us certainty, clarity, and evidence whenever we need it or ask for it. God will answer all our prayers. He will perform miracles upon request. He will give us a sign. So the charismatic goes the Catholic one better. 

It's not that the charismatic position is completely wrong. Sometimes God does something extra. But that's unpredictable. Not something you can count on.

6. By the same token, apostates and atheists think that God, if there is a God, ought to make things easier. Why should we have to trudge through Ed Feser's, Five Proofs for the Existence of God, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, or Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God–when God can give me a personal, custom-made epiphany? 

That's why some professing Christians become apostates. They had a Catholic outlook that was dashed by rude experience. God didn't give them the clarity, certainty, and evidence they demanded. 

7. The Protestant experience is like hiking on a trail. On some stretches, the trail is indistinct. Are you still on the trail, or are you lost in the forest? However, the trail picks up on the other side, so you were on the right path all along, even when the trail might be unrecognizable in spots.

I'd add that to say the evidence is uneven doesn't mean it's inadequate. It's not that you don't have enough evidence but that in many cases you have more than enough. 

But even if we sometimes lose our bearings, that's the actual situation God has put us in. God doesn't protect us from making mistakes. Rather, God protects us in our mistakes. 

I'm a schismatic!

In light of Catholic ecumenism, it's worth recalling that all Protestants are still officially classified as schismatics: 

schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff (1983 CIC 751). 

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P2H.HTM

Sheltering Jews

https://www.chambon.org/sauvage_chambon_ten_questions_en.htm

Formation of the Catholic epistles

Catholic apologists treat the canon of Scripture as a miscellaneous collection of books. Only church authority can justify that particular, arbitrary selection. The unity is imposed by the church, and not by the internal contents.

By contrast, this study draws attention to intertextual unity. The canon isn't just a random collection of books:

http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/review/letters-from-the-pillar-apostles-the-formation-of-the-catholic-epistles-as

Catholic methodists and Protestant particularists

Roderick Chisolm drew a classic distinction between two different approaches to epistemology: "methodists" begin with criteria or paradigms, whereas "particularists" begin with concrete examples or experience.

Another way of putting this is that methodists have an a prior stating-point while particularists have an a posteriori starting-point. 

This is one way to compare and contrast Catholic and Protestant theological method. Traditionally, Catholic theologists and apologists are methodists. They begin with their theological paradigm. They take their a priori criteria as the frame of reference. 

Take examples like the principle that an infallible text requires an infallible interpreter. Hence, there must be a living teaching office. 

Take appeals to "unity" or "visibility". Therefore, the church must have whatever it takes to meet these conditions. 

Take "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus". Therefore, saving grace must be challenged through the sacraments, which must be channeled through the priesthood, which must be channelled through apostolic succession. A circuit-breaker anywhere in the transmission disrupts the current. Anything after the break is invalid. 

Or take the claim that Protestant churches can't be true churches because they lack historical continuity. To be a real church, you must have a historical genealogy extending back to the founding of the church in the 1C. 

What all these stipulative principles share in common is to begin with a preconceived idea of what must be the case; then adjust your theology accordingly. 

By contrast, Protestants take a more a posteriori approach. We don't intuit ecclesiology.  We don't resort to armchair postulates regarding God's design for the church; rather, we judge God's intentions in retrospect by observing what God actually does. 

Unlike Catholics, we don't presume to know in advance what reality is like. God's design for Christianity is something we discover, after the fact. We learn from Bible history and church history what God's intentions are. 

Unlike Catholics, we're not scandalized by the messiness of church history. 

In a sense, Protestants begin with experience. The experience of divine providence. The experience of Bible history. 

And one of the systemic problems with traditional Catholic theological method is the ever-widening chasm between the idea of Catholicism and the reality of Catholicism. The disconnect between the abstract paradigm and the facts on the ground. 

In practice, the paradigm eventually adapts to unforeseen historical developments. When the paradigm becomes overly-encumbered by too many epicycles, ad hoc adjustments are made to the paradigm. Ex post facto revisions to criteria. Take the sea-change in how tradition is defined. Instead of a historical witness to early Christian belief, it becomes "living tradition". Take reversals on "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus", the anti-modernist strictures of the Leonine PBC, the death penalty, admission of divorced/remarried Catholics to communion, &c. 

Catholic apologists are like lawyers who can argue both sides of any case, depending on whether their client is innocent or guilty. If Benedict XVI or John-Paul II is their client, they defend that position; if Francis is their client, they defend the opposite. Ironically, what started out as an idealistic paradigm has become totally destabilized. 

Both supporters and opponents of Francis resort to circular logic:

Supporters: If Rome reverses policy, then the status quo ante was never definitive, irreversible teaching in the first place.

Opponents: If a pope teaches heresy, then he was never a real pope in the first place. 

Problem for supporters: Catholics can never know what's definitive, irreversible teaching, since all they know is the past, not the future–which may abruptly reverse course.

Problem for opponents: Catholics must be able to independently interpret what's magisterial and what's heretical.

Catholic "unity"

https://epistleofdude.wordpress.com/2017/11/03/1296

Was it a Reformation?

Predictably, many lay Catholic pop apologists denounced the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. However, a more useful benchmark is presented by Cardinal Müller, whom Benedict XVI made prefect of the CDF. As such, his reaction to the Protestant Reformation is a barometer of contemporary Catholic theology from the standpoint of the center-right faction. I'll comment on his article:

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-mueller-luthers-reform-was-against-the-holy-spirit

There is great confusion today when we talk about Luther, and it needs to be said clearly that from the point of view of dogmatic theology, from the point of view of the doctrine of the Church, it wasn’t a reform at all but rather a revolution, that is, a total change of the foundations of the Catholic Faith.

In a sense that's true. The errors in Roman Catholic theology were already too structural and systematic to be amendable to reform. It was necessary to scrap the entire paradigm. 

It is not realistic to argue that [Luther’s] intention was only to fight against abuses of indulgences or the sins of the Renaissance Church. Abuses and evil actions have always existed in the Church, not only during the Renaissance, and they still exist today. 

That was the difference between Luther and Erasmus. It wasn't just a case of abuses, but the underlying theology. 

We are the holy Church because of the God’s grace and the Sacraments, but all the men of the Church are sinners, they all need forgiveness, contrition, and repentance.

I don't think sacraments make the church holy. 

This distinction is very important. And in the book written by Luther in 1520, “De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae,” it is absolutely clear that Luther has left behind all of the principles of the Catholic Faith, Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition, the magisterium of the Pope and the Councils, and of the episcopate. In this sense, he upended the concept of the homogeneous development of Christian doctrine as explained in the Middle Ages, even denying that a sacrament is an efficacious sign of the grace contained therein. He replaced this objective efficacy of the sacraments with a subjective faith. Here, Luther abolished five sacraments, and he also denied the Eucharist: the sacrificial character of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the real conversion of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, he called the sacrament of episcopal ordination, the sacrament of Orders, an invention of the Pope — whom he called the Antichrist — and not part of the Church of Jesus Christ. Instead, we say that the sacramental hierarchy, in communion with the successor of Peter, is an essential element of the Catholic Church, and not only a principle of a human organization.

That is why we cannot accept Luther’s reform being called a reform of the Church in a Catholic sense. Catholic reform is a renewal of faith lived in grace, in the renewal of customs, of ethics, a spiritual and moral renewal of Christians; not a new foundation, not a new Church.

Good for Luther! What was needed was a root-and-branch repudiation of the Roman Catholic paradigm. Not a reform of the status quo, but a reclamation of the Biblical exemplar. Indeed, Luther didn't go far enough, but given where he started, given his theological conditioning, he made remarkable strides. He had the courage to be consistent to his vision. 

It is therefore unacceptable to assert that Luther’s reform “was an event of the Holy Spirit.” On the contrary, it was against the Holy Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit helps the Church to maintain her continuity through the Church’s magisterium, above all in the service of the Petrine ministry: on Peter has Jesus founded His Church (Mt 16:18), which is “the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15). The Holy Spirit does not contradict Himself.

That's a logical reaction, given Müller's Catholic standard of comparison. However, the rote prooftexting is part of the problem. Consider, for instance, how he attaches a passage from one author (Matthew) to another author (Paul), as if both of them have the same referent, without regard to the very different context of each. 

We hear so many voices speaking too enthusiastically about Luther, not knowing exactly his theology, his polemics and the disastrous effect of this movement which destroyed the unity of millions of Christians with the Catholic Church. 

That's part and parcel of the Catholic polemic. Luther rent the body of Christ. Luther committed the sin of schism. The "sin of separation from the Church"–as Müller later says. 

But in reality, the pre-Reformation "church" whose demise Catholics lament was simply the state religion. And what made it the state religion was its adoption by the ruling class. Historically, that's how particular religions and religious sects acquire a monopoly. If they capture the favor of the king or emperor or empress, then that in turn is imposed from the top down through forcible mass conversion. Cuius regio, eius religio. 

What Luther disrupted was a religious monopoly, which achieved that unchallenged status through royal patronage. There's nothing idealistic about that. It's the marriage of church politics with power politics. 

The Reformation established the principle that the ruling class doesn't choose my religion for me. It took a while for that to be implemented consistently, but it was a necessary mid-course correction. The Reformation was a restoration movement. 

We can evaluate positively his good will, the lucid explanation of the shared mysteries of faith but not his statements against the Catholic Faith, especially with regard to the sacraments and hierarchical-apostolic structure of the Church.

Nor is it correct to assert that Luther initially had good intentions, meaning by this that it was the rigid attitude of the Church that pushed him down the wrong road. This is not true: Luther was intent on fighting against the selling of indulgences, but the goal was not indulgences as such, but as an element of the Sacrament of Penance.

Luther was right to discern that the problem ran deeper than hawking indulgences. The source of the problem was the theology of penance. Kudos for Luther! 

Nor is it true that the Church refused to dialogue: Luther first had a dispute with John Eck; then the Pope sent Cardinal Gaetano as a liaison to talk to him. We can discuss the methods, but when it comes to the substance of the doctrine, it must be stated that the authority of the Church did not make mistakes. Otherwise, one must argue that, for a thousand years, the Church has taught errors regarding the faith, when we know — and this is an essential element of doctrine — that the Church can not err in the transmission of salvation in the sacraments.

Again, that's a logical reaction, given Müller's sectarian frame of reference, but it's unconvincing to anyone who doesn't already share his partisan assumptions. And notice his selective appeal to divine guidance. Yet both sides can't be right, so however you slice it, God didn't preserve one side from error. But in that event, why assume the Catholic side was protected from error rather than the Protestant side? Müller's appeal is arbitrary. 

One should not confuse personal mistakes and the sins of people in the Church with errors in doctrine and the sacraments. Those who do this believe that the Church is only an organization comprised of men and deny the principle that Jesus himself founded His Church and protects her in the transmission of the faith and grace in the sacraments through the Holy Spirit. His Church is not a merely human organization: it is the body of Christ, where the infallibility of the Council and the Pope exists in precisely described ways. 

That's a false dichotomy. Rejecting the pretensions of Rome doesn't entail belief that the church is a merely human, merely fallible organization, which wasn't founded by Christ. And it doesn't require a Catholic view of sacerdotalism and sacramentalism. For instance, a Protestant can believe the church is indefectable in the sense that God preserves a remnant from apostasy. 

All of the councils speak of the infallibility of the Magisterium, in setting forth the Catholic faith. 

Notice the blatantly circular appeal. The Magisterium vouches for the infallibility of the Magisterium! As if that patently self-serving claim is evidential in its own right. 

Amid today’s confusion, in many people this reality has been overturned: they believe the Pope is infallible when he speaks privately, but then when the Popes throughout history have set forth the Catholic faith, they say it is fallible.

Of course, 500 years have passed. It’s no longer the time for polemics but for seeking reconciliation: but not at the expense of truth. One should not create confusion. While on the one hand, we must be able to grasp the effectiveness of the Holy Spirit in these other non-Catholic Christians who have good will, and who have not personally committed this sin of separation from the Church, on the other we cannot change history, and what happened 500 years ago. It’s one thing to want to have good relations with non-Catholic Christians today, in order to bring us closer to a full communion with the Catholic hierarchy and with the acceptance of the Apostolic Tradition according to Catholic doctrine. It’s quite another thing to misunderstand or falsify what happened 500 years ago and the disastrous effect it had. An effect contrary to the will of God: “… that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou has sent me” (Jn 17:21).

i) Rome wasn't always so magnanimous about the effectiveness of the Holy Spirit in Protestant believers.

ii) The context of Jn 17:21 isn't ecclesiastical, but Trinitarian. In Jn 14-17, as well as 1 Jn 1, there's a threefold unity. There's the intra-Trinitarian fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit. Then there's Christians in fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit. Indeed, they wouldn't even be Christian apart from that. Then there's the mutual fellowship of Christians by virtue of their fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit. In Johannine theology, the unity of Christians is grounded in their participation in the paradigmatic unity of the Triune God. To be one with God is to be one with each othre. That's the source. It has no connection with "the sacramental hierarchy, in communion with the successor of Peter"–which is completely absent from Johannine theology. 

One sinking ship–or many lifeboats?

This year, Reformation Day was a bit more significant than the average Reformation Day because it marked the 500-year-anniversary of the Reformation Day. Admittedly, picking a particular day is somewhat arbitrary. The significance is symbolic. But that's often true for commemorations. We don't celebrate the Lord's Supper on the same calendar date as the Last Supper. We don't even know when that was. 

On this occasion, Ryan T. Anderson, a high-profile Catholic culture warrior, posted a volley of antagonistic, denunciatory tweets. Perhaps it's not worth commenting on, but I'll say a few things. Before commenting on the particulars, I'll make a few general observations:

i) What was Ryan trying to accomplish? I understand that as a pious Catholic he won't join in the "celebration". He disapproves of the Reformation. 

But what's striking about his reaction is that he made no effort at rational persuasion. He gave Protestant readers no reasons to share his point of view. It was one question-begging assertion after another. A string of tendentious talking-points. 

So what's the point? Who's the intended audience for his tweets? If he thinks Protestant theology is that bad, shouldn't he be reaching out to Protestants by patiently explaining to us why he's right and we're wrong? 

Admittedly, Twitter is a poor medium for rational discourse, but then, why not use Facebook or write an essay or arrange a formal debate or series of debates? Just telling Protestants they are wrong without presenting an argument is totally unconvincing. 

ii) In addition, there's an ironic quality to his tirade. Is his own Catholicism consistent with post-Vatican II theology? His belligerent disapproval perspective would make more sense if our eternal salvation were at stake. It would make more sense if Protestants were hellbound. And that's the position Rome used to take regarding everybody who wasn't in communion with Rome. But nowadays, the Magisterium is flirting with hopeful universalism. So it's not as if Protestants have much to lose, even from a Catholic standpoint. 

iii) Another problem with his tweets is bigotry. To judge by what he said, it seems highly unlikely that he's had many, if any, conversations, with evangelical philosophers, theologians, Bible scholars, and church historians. His uninformed comments are a textbook case of prejudice.   

iv) In addition, he's like a man standing in front of a burning house, which happens to be his own house, while he lectures the neighbors on how their house is an eyesore. We watch him stand there, scolding us, while right behind him we see his own house in flames. 

Pope Francis is an aggressive modernist who's torching social conservatives like Ryan. Yet there stands Ryan, with that burning house at his back, scolding Protestants because we don't rush into his burning house. His angry comparison between Rome and the Protestant movement is unintentionally comical when his own denomination is on fire, and the sitting pope is the arsonist. 

And that's not primarily the impression of a Protestant observer. Many devout Catholics are terrified at what they see Pope Francis doing. This includes cardinals and bishops as well as conservative Catholic academics. Shouldn't Ryan be helping them douse the raging fire before he presumes to draw an invidious contrast between his own denomination and the Protestant movement? 

Many poorly formed Catholics become Protestant. Whereas many converts to Catholicism were once fervent devout Protestants. An asymmetry.

What is Ryan's sample? Is that a representative comparison? What's the data-base for Ryan's generalization? Or is this just anecdotal, based on his insular experience? 

"Orthodox Protestantism"? Which version of Protestantism is "Orthodox Protestantism"? Lutherans disagree with Calvinists, with Baptists, etc.

Okay, but which version of Catholicism? Francis is unweaving the Catholicism of Benedict XVI and John-Paul II. What about the long-gone but not forgotten Catholicism of anti-modernist popes like Pius IX and Leo XIII? 

“The more I prayed, studied history & theology, read the Bible & Church Fathers, the more I felt God calling me to be Protestant” said no one.

Even assuming that's hyperbole, just about any major Protestant seminary has one or more church historians. How many conversations has Ryan had with Protestant church historians? Or Protestant pathologists? Or Protestant theologians and Bible scholars? 

For that matter, modern-day Catholic Bible scholars typically debunk traditional prooftexts for Catholicism. Modern-day Catholic church historians typically debunk the traditional narrative of the papacy. 

The knots Protestants tie themselves into to deny the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. John 6, Last Supper, 1 Cor 11, all symbolic..

What Protestant commentaries has Ryan even studied on the subject? And not just Protestant commentators. Take Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's commentary on 1 Corinthians. 

Reforming the church (good) and creating a pseudo church (bad) are two very different things.

Does post-Vatican II theology regard Protestant denominations as pseudo-churches? Or is Ryan out of step with contemporary Catholic theology? 

2,000 years of unbroken Christian practice, east and west, Catholic and Orthodox, rejected. That’s the Reformation today.

If you turn a blind eye to all the internal dissension.

Because of the Reformation, millions of Christians lack intimacy with Christ in the Eucharist. That’s just tragic.

Which assumes that Christ is to be found in a wafer. But what if that's a pious projection? What if Catholics are fellowshipping with an ordinary cracker? Like pagans who pray to an idol. No one's home. 

Orthodox Churches have valid Eucharist. Reformation bodies do not.

Is that the position of post-Vatican II theology?

BTW, why does the Eucharist require a Catholic priest to be valid, but baptism does not? What's the principle? Or is the distinction ad hoc? 

At best, Reformation was tragic necessity. In actuality, much worse. Celebrating the division and disunity in the body of Christ is obscene.

i) To begin with, there's a difference between a celebration and a commemoration. 

ii) Ryan assumes that his religious sect is the body of Christ. I get that. But he doesn't give Protestants any reason to see things his way. Instead, he resorts to shaming rhetoric. 

iii) If, by contrast, we view the Roman church on the eve of the Reformation as a morally and theologically corrupt religious monopoly, then competition is a good thing. It was good to give people options. It was good to have emergency exits. From an evangelical perspective, moreover, the church of Rome has gone from bad to worse. 

What's better–one sinking ship or many lifeboats? Should everybody stay on board a sinking ship? If all the passengers go down with the ship, that's unity–but I'll take my chances with a lifeboat. 

iv) I don't normally think about being Protestant. I just study the Bible with the wealth of resources at my disposal. 

The Legacy of the Reformation

https://arcdigital.media/the-legacy-of-the-reformation-3e03f30af49f