The Protestant's Dilemma (10 page)

Some Protestants seek to escape this dilemma by emphasizing that since the Bible is inerrant, we have a perfectly trustworthy witness. But this does not help them out of the bind, as McGrath explains:

It is perfectly possible for an inerrant text to be interpreted incorrectly. Asserting the infallibility of a text merely accentuates the importance of the interpreter of that text. Unless the interpreter is also thought of as infallible—a view that Protestantism has rejected, associating it with the Catholic views of the church or papacy—the issue of determining the “right” meaning of the Bible is not settled, or even addressed, by declaring that the sacred text is infallible.
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A Catholic can certainly agree that, regardless of whether an infallible interpreter exists, having an inerrant book is better than having an error-filled book. An infallible interpreter, one that can be asked questions and that can clarify its statements, is far superior—especially when dealing with passages of Scripture that produce conflicting interpretations. And that is exactly what we have in the Catholic magisterium.

Keith Mathison’s belief that we should look to the Church for how to interpret Scripture is correct, but he fails to correctly identify which Church that is. He wants the magisterium, but Protestantism doesn’t offer it.

Catholicism does. Christ founded the Church, established the apostles as its rightful leaders,
⁴⁸
and promised to send his Spirit to guide them until his return.
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Even in the first century we see the apostles acting with authority, interpreting Scripture and binding the faithful to their decisions.
⁵⁰
Only if they had been established by divine authority would they have the right to do this; the New Testament records that they
did
have that right.
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This same magisterium is found today in the Catholic Church, having continually exercised the authority Christ gave it. Since the Church is fully protected from error by the power and grace of God,
⁵²
the faithful can fully assent to it, trusting that it accurately teaches God’s saving truth.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
then
no infallible interpreter of Scripture exists and thus no interpretation can be accepted as authoritative. At best we’re forced to have faith that through some mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, all of our collective fallibility somehow leads us to the correct interpretation of Bible truths.

14: MISINTERPRETING THEGREAT COMMISSION

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Today’s Protestant missionaries are misinterpreting the Great Commission.

Thousands of Protestants work as full-time missionaries in far-off lands. Yet during the time of the Reformation and for centuries after, almost no Protestants went on any missions at all! This is because the founders of Protestantism believed the Great Commission—Jesus’ command to evangelize all peoples—applied only to the apostles.

No Need for Missionaries?

The Great Commission is described in the last verses of Matthew’s Gospel. When Jesus is about to ascend to heaven, he gives the apostles the command to go out into all the nations to baptize and teach them. Protestants today confidently point to those verses as the biblical motivation for their missionary activities, but most of them don’t realize that this interpretation is a fairly recent novelty within their ranks.

Indeed, for a few hundred years after the Reformation, Protestants understood this passage as Jesus’ telling
the apostles only
to go and spread the Good News, and they believed that this work had been accomplished sufficiently in the apostolic age. The Bible was their sole rule of faith, and the Bible said nothing about the Commission extending beyond the apostles. As one historian put it:

Both Reformed and Lutheran theologians of the last sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, such as Theodore Beza and Johann Gerhard, argued that the Commission came to an end with the close of the apostolic age. Given this hostility toward mission within classical Protestantism, the rise of missionary activity during the eighteenth century is actually quite remarkable. . . . It was not until the 1830s that most mainline Protestant churches in the West regarded mission as a “good thing.”
⁵³

Early Protestants believed that Christ’s Second Coming was near at hand, so why set out on evangelizing missions? Further, they believed that God would take care of converting non-Christians in his own good time, basing this belief on the fact that God doesn’t need any help making converts.
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Calvin and Luther believed that the primary “missionary” need was to reform Catholics. Calvin also argued that it was the duty of the Christian state or province—not the individual believer or even the churches themselves—to evangelize non-Christians. These beliefs strike most Protestants today as woefully erroneous, but they are consistent with Protestantism’s founding principles. McGrath explains that this interpretive reversal is not surprising, given Protestantism’s very nature:

This important transition is partly explained by a classic feature of the development of Protestantism: the shifting interpretation of core biblical texts. Definitive interpretations of those texts were offered and accepted by one generation, only to be overturned by another; a new understanding of the identity and mission of Protestantism thus arose as being self-evidently correct.
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By interpreting Scripture themselves, apart from the Church’s magisterium and Sacred Tradition, the Reformers established a novel tradition of their own that acted as a powerful influence over all Protestantism for hundreds of years. This no-need-for-missionaries tradition colored the lens through which other Protestants read the Bible, and only after several centuries was this tradition scrutinized and eventually discarded.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

The Church has always understood the Great Commission as applying to Christians in every era.

While the Reformers were staying home with their novel interpretation of these verses, content to poach Catholics away from Rome, one of the greatest missionaries of all time, St. Francis Xavier, was leaving Europe’s shores for Asia to bring the gospel to peoples who had never heard it: in Japan, Borneo, and India.

This mission for Catholics to evangelize does not belong only to the great saints. It is a call for all of us and has been since the beginning. In the twentieth century, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed that “the task of evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the Church.”
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He also explained, “On all Christians therefore is laid the preeminent responsibility of working to make the divine message of salvation known and accepted by all men throughout the world.”
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The history of the Catholic Church, even prior to the Reformation, demonstrates consistent commitment to spreading the gospel of Christ to the ends of the earth.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight we know that the end of days was not imminent in the 1500s. And the idea that the state should be responsible for evangelizing seems like nonsense to us. But at the time of the Reformation, when nations and churches were deeply intertwined, this notion was much more credible. The Catholic Church, however—transcending nations, political philosophies, and time—has always known that the duty to evangelize belongs to the Church and to each of its members.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
either the founders of Protestantism made a huge blunder in interpreting the scriptural Great Commission, establishing a centuries-long precedent that Protestants do not go on missions, or they were right, and Protestant missionaries today are wasting their time on a pointless and unbiblical exercise.

15: THE CLOSURE OF PUBLIC REVELATION

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

There’s no reason to believe that public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle.

Virtually Christians agree that public revelation—the “deposit of faith” given by God to man for our salvation, as opposed to private revelations given by God to individuals for some specific purpose—ended with the death of the last apostle. Because of this, we know that all necessary salvific truths have already been given to us, although we may expand or deepen our understanding of those truths over time.

Protestants believe this even though no passage in the Bible states when (or if) public revelation ended or will end. This puts them in the awkward position of affirming
sola scriptura
while also professing belief in this binding truth found nowhere in Scripture.

One Extra Revelation Needed

The popular Protestant understanding of the closure of public revelation is described in the Westminster Confession of Faith:

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.
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The Westminster divines were borrowing from the long-held understanding of the Church that no more books would be inspired by God. But no biblical verses explicitly support this declaration.

Not that Protestants haven’t tried to find one. Since the Book of Revelation is usually placed at the end the Bible, some of them point to Revelation 22:18
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as evidence that no more books could be added after it. But the strongest verse that could be interpreted to support the belief that public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle is Jude 3: “I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.”
Protestants assume that the faith delivered to the saints is coextensive with the books of the Bible; so if that faith was “once for all delivered,” then no more books could be inspired.

Sola scriptura
therefore requires that public revelation ended. Otherwise books could be added to the Bible, and those books could contain infallible statements that would either add new truths to the existing body of revelation or, even worse, modify or outright refute Protestant interpretations of other verses. Protestants intuitively understand this principle, which explains one reason why they respond so strongly against Mormonism, which claims to be a Christian religion but has added books to Scripture.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Sacred Tradition also contains God’s revelation to man, and it tells us when revelation ended.

The passage from the book of Revelation that warns people not to add or take away from the words of the book clearly refers only to that book (since at the time of its writing there was no single “book” of the whole Bible). Indeed, similar passages exist in Deuteronomy 4 and 12, yet, of course, many books were added to the Bible after Deuteronomy.

Jude 3 is a more interesting possibility, and in Catholic theology it is plausible to interpret the verse in a way that supports (but not proves) the belief that public revelation is closed. One problem for a Protestant seeking to use it alone as a prooftext is the probable dating of Jude itself. Unless Jude were the very last book of the Bible to be written, it makes no sense to claim that the inspired author intended his words to mean that no more books of the Bible would come after him. Scholars consider it likely that 2 Peter draws from Jude, which argues for an earlier dating of the letter, probably in the 50s or 60s. Another problem is that Jude’s status as Scripture was not universally attested to—recall Luther himself appealed to this fact in his prologue to the four New Testament books he rejected, which included Jude. Since the Church took centuries to accept Jude as Scripture, it is unlikely that one of its statements would have been used to prove the closure of public revelation.