The Protestant's Dilemma (12 page)

This is not a problem for the Catholic because his Church is protected from error by the Holy Spirit. He has the magisterium of the Church to guide him through.

So, for example, in the passage where Jesus exhorts his followers not to invite friends to meals, or where he commands them to turn the other cheek, the Church provides the sure interpretation
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that in these instances Christ is teaching important principles (giving to the poor and loving our enemies are meritorious things), not giving absolute and literal moral commandments.

On the other hand, the Church teaches authoritatively that Christ’s difficult-sounding words about divorce and remarriage
do
amount to a strict moral command. Likewise, that Christ meant to be taken literally when he told his followers to eat his flesh, and then at the Last Supper said, “This is my body.”

St. Paul’s command on head coverings for women is also instructive. Most Protestants would say that this statement was culturally conditioned; that it held for its time and a place but at some point expired. Yet nothing in the verses themselves say that or even imply it. Another principle must be brought from outside of Scripture (and therefore to the Protestant, fallible by definition) to inform the reader whether the verse should apply or not.

This is a primary cause of Protestant division: disagreement over what verses of the Bible mean, how they should be applied, whether they are essential or non-essential, and so on. One Protestant is ready to fall on his sword over women covering their heads, while another thinks it is simply obvious that that passage no longer applies to Christians. One group notices the lack of musical instruments mentioned in the New Testament and interprets it to mean that the Sunday worship service must be
a cappella
, while another thinks organs or guitars are fine.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then we must obey the Bible alone, even when its commands seem impractical, even absurd, for we reject any authoritative interpreter outside of Scripture itself. Yet in practice Protestants don’t do this. Instead they fill in the interpretive vacuum by silently accepting various principles and ideas that form a lens through which they read the word of God.

PART 3: THE SACRAMENTS AND SALVATION

18: THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Asking for the prayers of saints in heaven is a sort of idolatry.

Protestants agree that we can and should ask one another for prayers, but not that we should make the same request of Christians who have gone before us. (In their terminology, “the saints” refers to Christians living on earth today, not to Christians who have died in Christ and whose souls are now with God.) They base this belief on biblical prohibitions against necromancy, and on the absence of direct testimony (in their biblical books, anyway) to communion between Christians on earth and those in heaven.

Sundered Communion

Luther and the early Protestants rejected not only prayers on behalf of the dead (because they rejected belief in purgatory), but also the idea that the saints in heaven can pray for
us.
Protestants to this day likewise believe that those who have passed away, whether they are in heaven or hell, are completely disconnected from us here on Earth. This seems like common sense. Your loved one died, so that’s it for any kind of relationship with him, at least until Christ returns in glory and we are resurrected. We’re strictly forbidden to conjure dead spirits, and it seems no different to ask the dead for the prayers—even those who have died in Christ.

Catholic devotion to the saints offends Protestants in other ways, too: They believe only God should be honored and that venerating the saints steals glory from him; they believe that at least some Catholics turn veneration into worship and thus sin by either worshiping a person instead of God or (worse), worshiping a statue representing a person; finally the perceived macabre earthiness of relics—bones and clothes of saints, for example—evokes an almost instinctive revulsion from them. For Protestants, the dangers of Christians taking such veneration to superstitious extremes is reason enough to shun the practice, as Martin Luther described in one of his feast day sermons on the veneration of Mary:

First Christ is diminished by those who place their hearts more upon Mary than upon Christ himself. In doing so Christ is forced into the background and completely forgotten. . . . [The monks] have used Mary as an excuse to invent all kinds of lies by which she could be used to establish their twaddle. They have used Scriptures to drag Mary by the hair and force her to go where she never intended.
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Luther was not against honoring Mary, but he felt that certain monks had gone too far with it, leading the people astray. Protestants today echo his fears but go still further, rejecting veneration of the saints entirely.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

God is a loving Father who makes it possible for his children to exchange gifts with one another.

The Catholic Church teaches a doctrine called the
communion of saints
, which the Catholic Encyclopedia calls the

spiritual solidarity which binds together the faithful on earth, the souls in purgatory, and the saints in heaven in the organic unity of the same mystical body under Christ its head. . . . The participants in that solidarity are called saints by reason of their destination [heaven] and of their partaking of the fruits of the Redemption.
⁶⁶

This ancient belief has its roots in the Bible’s references to the Church being “the household of God” (see Eph. 2:19), whose members are the Christian faithful. Since we know that those who die in Christ do not die eternally but rather still live in Christ, awaiting the resurrection, the faithful who have died in God’s friendship remain united to the Church, which is Christ’s body (cf. Eph. 4:4–13). And so the Church as a supernatural society extends beyond those currently living on Earth. Based on these truths, since we Christians pray for one another here on Earth, we also receive graces from the prayers of the saints in heaven and can pray for the saints being purified in purgatory. Though we cannot see them, we know that they are with God and are members of his Church, as we are.

To the objection that those who have died in Christ are dead and therefore no communion with them is possible, the account of the Transfiguration poses a solid rebuttal. The great Old Testament men, Moses and Elijah, appear before Jesus—and Peter, James, and John: “And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him” (Matt. 17:1–8). Though a Protestant might point out that Elijah had been taken up to heaven before his death, Moses certainly died (see Deut. 34). Yet Moses obviously lives, as he appears talking with Jesus in the presence of the apostles.

Couple this account of two “dead” men talking with Jesus with the revelation that Jesus used to refute the Sadducees in their denial of the resurrection: “That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called ‘Lord’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive” (Luke 20:37–38). Those who have passed from this world are still very much alive to God, and may even communicate with those on Earth, because God desires it and makes it possible.

The communion of saints is a spiritual family, and death cannot sunder it, because we are joined to Christ who has conquered death. So we ask our brethren here on Earth to pray for us, knowing they are in Christ, and we do the same for those who have fallen asleep in him. God is a loving Father who, like earthly fathers, delights when his children are rightly praised for the good they do in their attempts to follow his commandments.

Regarding veneration of the saints and relics, it should first be made clear that it
is
sinful for anyone to worship someone or something other than God. The Catholic Church teaches that, and if some Catholics don’t know it, they need to be told. So worshiping a saint is wrong, and worshiping a statue of the saint—heaven forbid—is wrong.
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Do we steal glory from God when we honor one of his children? On the contrary, by recognizing that the good deeds and holy lives of the saints were products of God’s grace, and by seeking to emulate them, we give due honor to God.
⁶⁸

What do we make of relics? I admit that as a Protestant they repelled me. But I later realized that those feelings were caused largely by the bias that had formed within me from living in a Protestant ecclesial culture. Most Protestants don’t realize that support for relics occurs even in the Old Testament, when God raised a dead man back to life through the bones of Elisha the prophet:

And as a man was being buried, lo, a marauding band was seen and the man was cast into the grave of Eli’sha; and as soon as the man touched the bones of Eli’sha, he revived, and stood on his feet.
⁶⁹

In the book of Acts, we read that “God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them” (Acts 19:11–12). So whether we find relics loathsome or not, clear precedents from the inspired word of God exist for them.

The Protestant’s Dilemma

If Protestantism is true,
then
the individualism of modern earthly Protestantism also extends to those who have fallen asleep in Christ. We have no connection to those brethren who have gone to their reward in Christ, for God keeps us all separate from one another, despite the Church’s being called his family. The Church’s ancient practice of asking saints for intercession has all along been the grave evil of necromancy or idolatry.

19: BAPTISMAL REGENERATION

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

The purpose and meaning of baptism are anyone’s guess.

From very early on, the Church has taught the doctrine of baptismal regeneration: that through baptism people are justified and united to Christ. The Holy Spirit comes to dwell within them, and they are then said to be in a state of sanctifying grace (friendship with God). The witness of the early Christian writings is unanimous in this understanding. But Protestants today have wide-ranging, divergent beliefs about this sacrament, which spring from the conflicting teachings of the Reformers themselves.

The Protestant Spectrum on Baptism

The Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli was the first major figure to propose the idea that baptism is just a symbol that signifies God’s covenant with us. This novel idea was consistent with Zwingli’s other theological ideas (especially the figurative interpretation of the Eucharist), and it was another point on which he diverged from Luther, who held to baptismal regeneration.

For most Protestants, especially Evangelicals, baptism is something that they do for God. It’s a stand they take, a message they send to their church and to society. They make a decision to give their life to Jesus, and they get baptized to demonstrate outwardly to the church what Jesus has already done in them inwardly. They believe that God gives no grace through baptism; rather, they believe that they already received the Holy Spirit when they asked Jesus into their hearts and put their faith in him as their Lord and savior. All of the important things, the ones that Protestants believe are necessary for salvation, have thus been completed, so by getting baptized they are simply demonstrating their obedience to Jesus and making a public proclamation of their faith in him for all to see.

Luther and Calvin, on the other hand, held baptism to be more than symbolic, tying it directly to justification. Neither wished to jettison the ancient belief in baptismal regeneration. Calvin taught that baptism was the normative means of salvation, writing: “It is true that, by neglecting baptism we are excluded from salvation.”
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But Calvin
was
concerned with people believing that baptism was some kind of magical ritual. So he maintained that an obstinate person, or anyone who received it in a blind, superstitious way, would not be regenerated through baptism.
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