The Protestant's Dilemma (14 page)

His reasoning is compelling: If infant baptism is invalid, then the vast majority of Christians (who were baptized as infants) were invalidly baptized, and thus never received the Holy Spirit or the virtues of faith, hope, and love. They were therefore not members of Christ’s Church and thus could not even be rightfully called Christians. On the other hand, if infant baptism is valid, then the Protestant groups practicing credo-baptism were denying children the supernatural help they needed to be saved.

Either the magisterial Reformers were correct in teaching infant baptism even though it’s not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, or the radical Reformers were correct in rejecting infant baptism as an unbiblical practice on which the Church had fallen into error from the beginning. To accept the radical Reformers’ interpretation, as most Evangelicals do, would concede to them a credible claim to faithful scriptural interpretation—tough to do, given the Anabaptists’ rejection of the Trinity and Christ’s divinity, with which only a tiny minority of modern Protestants would agree. On the other hand, to side with the magisterial Reformers also raises a thorny question: If we accept this particular tradition of the early Church, even though it isn’t explicitly defined in the Bible, on what basis do we reject other ancient traditions such as prayers for the dead, the Mass, purgatory, the primacy of the church of Rome, and baptismal regeneration—all of which have as much as or even more scriptural support than does infant baptism?

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
we would expect that a subject as important as who should and who shouldn’t receive baptism would be clear from Scripture. But it manifestly is not, and faithful Protestants have fallen on different sides of the issue for almost 500 years. In the balance hang the millions of souls who as infants were either baptized invalidly or denied baptism’s saving grace.

21: SANCTIFICATION AND PURGATORY

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

When we die, God waves a magic sanctification wand over us wretched, filthy sinners to make us suddenly fit for heaven.

Psalm 24 asks, “Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place?” The psalmist immediately answers: “He who has clean hands and a pure heart.” Similarly, Jesus tells his listeners in Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Purity of heart is a requirement to be able to “see God.” Yet Protestantism maintains that even justified Christians are impure in their hearts, their sanctifying works defiled.

Christians Remain Impure in Heart

Protestants believe that salvation consists of two main parts: justification and sanctification. For them, justification is that one-time event in which the unregenerate man accepts Jesus as Lord and Savior and has Christ’s righteousness imputed to him. His sins are forgiven; he is now a Christian. Sanctification now begins.

This sanctification is an ongoing process whereby the Holy Spirit gives grace to the believer and helps him follow God’s will (see Ephesians 2:10) in order to become more like Jesus. So far, so good. But these works and this grace do not make the Christian truly pure in heart, nor are the works themselves pure and holy. As the Westminster Larger Catechism says in question 78:

The imperfection of sanctification in believers arises from the remnants of sin abiding in every part of them, and the perpetual lustings of the flesh against the spirit; whereby they are often foiled with temptations, and fall into many sins, are hindered in all their spiritual services, and their best works are imperfect and defiled in the sight of God.

Note that even “their best works” are “defiled in the sight of God,” because it is impossible for the believer, even with the help of God’s grace, to obey God perfectly. Jesus may have said that we must be perfect like the Father,
⁸²
but Protestants deny that this is possible.

Further, we cannot even become pure in heart, for “the remnants of sin” abide in “every part” of us. Our hearts remain defiled, and the works they produce are tainted. Even the most minor of the “many sins” that the Christian falls into on a daily basis are not negligible, for “there is no sin so small, but that it deserves damnation.”
⁸³
All this stems from the root Protestant doctrine of justification—that we are not truly made holy in justification, only declared so. The image of the Christian as a dung mound covered in snow, distilled from Martin Luther’s writings, remains an apt description of how Protestants believe that Christians remain impure, in spite of God’s grace.

And if we are impure, then we cannot see God, as both the Old Testament and Jesus testify that we cannot appear before God unless we are pure in heart.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Through sanctification we are truly made holy, empowered by the Spirit to fulfill the New Covenant law of love.

The Catholic Church teaches that justification is not just a divine legal fiction wherein the Christian is declared to be something he is not (righteous). Instead, by grace through faith united to God’s love, God inwardly justifies the Christian by the power of his mercy, infusing his sanctifying grace into him, making him pure of heart. The tendency to sin, it is true, is still there. The Church calls this
concupiscence
. But its existence does not render null or tainted the good works that Christians do in God’s grace. The
Catechism of the Catholic Church
says, “With justification, faith, hope, and charity are poured into our hearts, and obedience to the divine will is granted us.”
⁸⁴

This makes the Protestant conception of sanctification look self-contradictory and empty, as Jason Stellman, a long-time Presbyterian pastor turned Catholic convert, pointedly expressed:

While sanctification is insisted upon in the Reformed [Protestant] paradigm, the fact that not a single thing we do in this life is deserving of anything but hell, together with the fact that all one’s future sins are forgiven in justification, brings me to the conclusion I stated above: In the Reformed system, sanctification is a mere footnote to justification, an optional afterthought that consigns our Spirit-wrought works of love and sacrifice to the level of mere response that, while great if it’s actually offered, doesn’t have any causal relation to our being saved in the end.
⁸⁵

In Catholicism, sanctification is not an afterthought but the process whereby we become holy, so that when our earthly life comes to an end, we are prepared to meet God with a clean heart. This paradigm, which maintains that we can truly become holy by God’s grace, harmonizes with the Bible better than does the Protestant paradigm. St. Paul writes in Romans:

For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification. . . . But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life.
⁸⁶

The end of sanctification is eternal life. But what if the justified Christian fails to become fully sanctified in this life? Simple, he goes to purgatory after death. There the process of sanctification will be completed, his heart purified so that it is fit to see God. All the attachment to sin and selfishness, as well as the temporal punishment due for sin, are purged in the cleansing power of God’s love. The choice for the Christian is clear: either be sanctified in this life, through meritorious works and prayerful endurance of the sufferings and reverses that come your way, or do so in the next life through suffering alone.

This comports perfectly with the difficult passage in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.
⁸⁷

Purgatory is that state after death in which Christians are being saved through proverbial fire. Since Protestants reject this doctrine, and further since they reject the biblical teaching that we can fulfill the law of love by God’s grace, the only way they can enter God’s presence is by his waving the magic wand of sanctification over them at death, so that their impure hearts will be automatically purified, rendering them fit for seeing God.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then neither Jesus’ command to be holy nor the grace he offers us to become so have any real meaning. We should also expect to find in the Bible many references to the powerlessness of God’s grace to make us pure in heart, as well as explicit testimony to the instant holiness (waving of the sanctification wand) Jesus grants us right before we walk through heaven’s gate. Instead, Jesus and the apostles tell us we can
truly
become holy and pure in heart, by God’s grace, and we can do works that are fitting and holy.

22: MARRIAGE AS A SACRAMENT

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Marriage is not an outward sign of an inward grace wrought by God, even though Protestants sometimes act like it is.

The Catholic Church teaches that “sacraments are outward signs of inward grace, instituted by Christ for our sanctification.”
⁸⁸
We have seen that Protestants, following the lead of Martin Luther, explicitly rejected five of the seven sacraments, including marriage. Confusingly, however, most Protestants effectively
do
believe that marriage is an outward sign of inward grace, in unwitting rejection of their founding theology.

Marriage: A Secular Contract or Covenant

In rejecting the Catholic sacramental theology of marriage, Luther placed it squarely in the earthly, as opposed to heavenly, kingdom. But while he considered it nothing more than a contract, enforced by the civil authorities, he believed that God used it for divine purposes, so it was not without spiritual value. Calvin went further and, later in his life, developed a theology and legal framework for marriage based on his belief that marriage was a covenant between the spouses and God. He wrote:

God is the founder of marriage. When a marriage takes place between a man and a woman, God presides and requires a mutual pledge from both. Hence Solomon, in Proverbs 2:17, calls marriage the covenant of God, for it is superior to all human contracts. So also Malachi declares that God is as it were the stipulator who by his authority joins the man to the woman, and sanctions the alliance.
⁸⁹

We see that, although Calvin stopped short of calling marriage a sacrament, he attributed a covenantal status to it and believed that God was its author.

Anglican Protestantism also viewed marriage as divine in origin, even while denying that it was a sacrament. Reading the words of the traditional Anglican wedding ceremony, it’s difficult to find anything that differs from Catholic theology:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee. . . . [God], knitting them together, didst teach that it should never be lawful to put asunder those whom thou by Matrimony hadst made one.
⁹⁰

Notice the admission that marriage resulted in the union of the two persons. They became one—an inward grace if there ever were one—through the outward signs of the wedding ceremony, the vows, and the consummation. This Anglican ceremony even recognizes, as Catholics do, that Christ elevated marriage through his participation and miracle-working at the wedding in Cana.