The Protestant's Dilemma (11 page)

(As a side note, Jude 3 and the belief that public revelation ended with the last apostle’s death also does not help us with a book like 1 Clement, written by St. Clement in all likelihood before the apostles died. Many people in the early Church accepted 1 Clement as inspired, and the letter was read in the church of Corinth and other churches for many centuries. The author was a close associate of the apostles and thus, like other books we do accept as inspired, could have written one himself.)

If this belief about the end of public revelation did not come from Scripture, where did it come from? The answer is Sacred Tradition:
the revealed Christian truths that were not written down to be part of Scripture but were transmitted orally and preserved by the Church. As the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation from the Second Vatican Council explains:

For this reason Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making himself present and manifesting himself: through His words and deeds, His signs and wonders, but especially through His death and glorious resurrection from the dead and final sending of the Spirit of truth. Moreover He confirmed with divine testimony what revelation proclaimed, that God is with us to free us from the darkness of sin and death, and to raise us up to life eternal. The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (see 1 Tim. 6:14 and Tit. 2:13).
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Protestants frequently attack Catholic truths found principally in Sacred Tradition (such as Mary’s Immaculate Conception), even caricaturing the very idea of Tradition as a game of Telephone, where the original message gets garbled as it passes along a chain of people until what the last person hears doesn’t even resemble the original. But they don’t have a problem with accepting Tradition’s judgment about the closure of public revelation, because they happen to believe that one (not to mention that guaranteeing the biblical canon is closed is also a necessary precondition for sola scriptura).

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
there is no reason to say for sure that revelation is closed (since nowhere does Scripture say it is). And so the possibility remains that there may be future public revelation—like the Book of Mormon—leading to confusion and chaos among God’s people.

16: THE ROLE OF HISTORY AND TRADITION

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Christians have zero need to understand even their own history or tradition.

According to s
ola scriptura
and the principle of private judgment, Protestants believe they can discover saving Christian truth themselves, using only their Bible and the Spirit. This understanding is especially prevalent in Evangelicalism—stemming perhaps from the influence of the Radical Reformers, who were not impressed by Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin and instead took the magisterial Reformers’ ideas to their logical end. As a result, most Evangelicals today know little about history and tradition, including the history of their own beliefs.

Distrust of History and Tradition

One of the events that led to the anti-traditional bent of Evangelicals was the revivalism of the First and Second Great Awakenings in the United States 200 years ago. Mark Noll, an Evangelical Protestant historian, describes this phenomenon:

The problem with revivalism for the life of the mind, however, lay precisely in its anti-traditionalism. Revivals called people to Christ as a way of escaping tradition, including traditional learning. They called upon individuals to take the step of faith for themselves. In so doing, they often led to the impression that individual believers could accept nothing from others. Everything of value in the Christian life had to come from the individual’s own choice—not just personal faith but every scrap of wisdom, understanding, and conviction about the faith. This dismissal of tradition was no better illustrated than in a memorable comment by two Kentucky revivalists early in the nineteenth century. When quotations from [John] Calvin were used to argue against Robert Marshall and J. Thompson, they replied, “We are not personally acquainted with the writings of John Calvin, nor are we certain how nearly we agree with his views of divine truths; neither do we care.”
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Even though Evangelicals owe many of their most important beliefs to John Calvin’s influence, through the revival spirit of anti-traditionalism many denied any connection with him and did not even have a basic understanding of who he was. Fast-forward to today, and the situation is much the same. One Evangelical friend of mine said almost the same thing to me: “I don’t care what Luther or any other Protestant teaches,” much less what some Christian from the second century said—even if he was a disciple of John the Evangelist! Why don’t he and other Evangelicals care what Luther or anyone else says? Because my friend has the Holy Spirit dwelling within him, and he has his Bible, so he believes from those he can individually come to know divine truth.

It is not only “Protestants in the pews” who have a low view of history and tradition. Consider well-regarded Protestant apologist William Webster, whose book
The Church of Rome at the Bar of History
sought to discredit the Catholic Church. In his section on St. Thomas Aquinas, Webster “summarizes” the
Summa Theologiae
in a mere six sentences, to the effect that Aquinas taught that faith in Jesus Christ is not vital to salvation.
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For Evangelicals like Webster, even the most brilliant and faithful men who lived in prior centuries are superfluous to our “walk with God.”

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

It’s important to learn from the wisdom of those who have gone before us in faith.

One of my Anglican friends wanted to buy a book by St. Augustine, a Father of the Church who is known as the “Doctor of Grace.” He happened to be close to a popular Christian chain bookstore, so he stopped in and looked around. Not finding the book, he approached the person working at the store to ask where he could find it: “Pardon me, where are your books by Augustine?” The employee looked at him blankly and responded, “Augustine who?”

This little story demonstrates an endemic problem with Evangelical Protestants: They have largely forgotten men and women who came before them in the Christian faith, those giants on whose shoulders (and prayers) they now stand. Christianity didn’t end in the year 100 when the Bible was finished being written and resume again 1,500 years later when the first Baptists founded a new ecclesial community. But going into this Christian store, one is hard pressed to find a book written in the time period between the Bible and the twentieth century.

A dose of humility is the remedy. Just as we do not attempt to re-derive all mathematical and scientific formulas anew in every generation, so we should stand on the shoulders of the saintly theological giants who have gone before us. If nothing else, it stands to reason that the men and women closest in time and proximity to the apostles could give us invaluable insights into their teachings. And, indeed, this is what we see when we read their works.
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This is exactly the pattern followed in the Old Covenant, in which the Israelites revered and learned from the great men and women of God who had gone before them—so much so that these heroes were eulogized in the New Testament in chapter 11 of the book of Hebrews. The inspired author instructs us to learn from the examples of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, David, and the holy woman in 2 Maccabees 7. How much more so, then, should we learn from the great Christian saints of the past 2,000 years? Rather than reinvent the wheel (and inevitably design a worse one), we should build on the wisdom of the great men and women whom God has raised up in the Church since Christ founded it.

Even secular wisdom informs us that forgetting history condemns us to repeat it. Many of the heresies today are not new—they are unwittingly recycled from centuries past, often by well-meaning Christians who interpret the Bible apart from Tradition and the historical witness of the Church. The Catholic belief that our Lord has guided his Church into all truth through every century gives us the confidence that we can trust our forefathers in the Faith.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then Christians in each generation figure out all truth for themselves, with nothing but the Bible as their guide. After all, it is quite possible that the Christians who came before us made errors, even on important doctrines, and that God is raising up new voices today to correct those errors. But how can we know which are teaching truth, and which are reviving old heresies?

17: DOING WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Christians must follow even the seemingly absurd commands of Scripture.

Protestants point to the Bible as their sole rule of faith. But the Bible contains many commands, some of which may seem kind of strange. But they’re expressed plainly enough, so they should be followed without fail. Yet Protestants don’t follow them all. Instead, they use some extra-scriptural filter to help them pick and choose which ones to accept and which ones to reject.

The Word of God Says

Let’s look at some biblical commands and think about whether Protestants are following them consistently. In Luke 14:12–13, Jesus says:

When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.

I cannot remember the last time that faithful Protestant friends of mine did this. In fact, I don’t think any of them ever have. Yet Jesus doesn’t offer any exceptions. He is quite clear that people should invite the outcasts to dinner and not their friends or relations, or wealthy people.

St. Paul is quite popular among Protestants, at least with some things he says. Less popular however are these words of his for women, in 1 Cor. 11:5–6:

Any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled dishonors her head—it is the same as if her head were shaven. For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair.

Although a few Protestant sects exist where women wear veils, these are a tiny minority. When was the last time you walked into a Protestant church and saw a sea of veils covering the heads of the women? This command of St. Paul’s, inspired by God no less, is nearly universally ignored by Protestants.

When he speaks of marriage in Luke 16:18, our Lord says:

Every one who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.

Yet, most Protestant churches allow divorce and remarriage without any examination of the original marriage. Christ is clear here (and in Matt. 19:6) that there is no divorce and remarriage but rather only adultery when someone divorces and “marries” another. It’s another tough teaching silently ignored by the vast majority of Protestant denominations.

In one of the most famous passages in the Bible, Jesus gives commands for how we are to respond when someone wrongs us. He says in Matthew 5:38–39:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Now, most Protestants might agree that this is a good thing to do, at least in theory. But how many do it, literally or even figuratively? Very few, at best. Yet Jesus again makes no exceptions and adds no qualifiers.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

We have a divinely ordained interpreter of Scripture to help us understand difficult passages.

It seems obvious that the Bible cannot be taken in every verse literalistically: Otherwise we’d all be breaking Christ’s express command every time we throw a party with friends! A given book or passage may contain poetry, parable, apocalyptic imagery, or hyperbole, each necessitating its own interpretive principles. But the Bible itself doesn’t tell us when to use
which
principle in a given instance; neither do all scholars or theologians agree on it. A Protestant, bound by
sola scriptura,
cannot appeal to a magisterium, or Sacred Tradition, or even sound principles of biblical scholarship, for all these things are extra-scriptural. When encountering difficult and even seemingly absurd scriptural data, he can only make his own interior judgment about what to accept as literal and what to interpret otherwise.