The Protestant's Dilemma (15 page)

Protestants today esteem marriage highly, recognizing its goodness and its analogy to Christ’s marriage with his bride the Church. Following Calvin, most view it as a covenant between the husband, the wife, and God, though one that can be dissolved for a wide variety of reasons.

And therein lies the rub. It’s a dissoluble union, not a sacrament. In the Old Covenant, we learned that Moses let them divorce due to the hardness of their hearts,
⁹¹
and for Protestants not much has changed since then: divorce for any reason and remarriage at will. So although they would
like
marriage to have some deep, spiritual, quasi-sacramental aspect—and historically they attempted to claim such an aspect—by rejecting its sacramental indissolubility, they forfeit any claim to such an interpretation. For Protestants, the New Covenant essentially makes no difference when it comes to marriage, even though they pay lip service to what Christ said and did about it.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

We know that Christian marriage is a sacrament, a sign of God’s grace ordered toward salvation.

Genesis 2:24 says, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one flesh.” In Mark 10, Jesus reaffirms this teaching on marriage in explaining why divorce is impossible. From these verses and the universal witness of Christian history, clearly marriage is something instituted by God and pleasing to him. A Christian man and woman have a wedding ceremony where they exchange marriage vows. Then they consummate their vows through the marital embrace, and in doing so, they become one flesh. God joins them together as one, and even if they were to separate or to have their civil marriage dissolved, in God’s eyes—and therefore in reality—they are still married. Thus, the sacrament of marriage is an outward sign—through the wedding ceremony, the dress, the rings, the bells, the procession, the vows, the marital embrace—that signifies the inward grace that unites the couple as one flesh.

Catholics thus enjoy the integrity of treating marriage like a sacrament
and
believing it to be one. Thus the Church recognizes that a valid marriage between baptized persons is
indissoluble.
If there is a civil divorce, the spouses may not marry someone else while the other is still alive—it would be an impossibility. For God has joined them together, and man cannot sunder them. Protestant churches, on the other hand, marry divorced Christians all the time. Lacking the theological commitment to marriage as a sacrament, they believe that various actions by either spouse can break the covenant between them.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
marriage should not be considered a sacrament, a visible sign by which God bestows invisible grace on a couple to make them one flesh. This despite the desire of most Christians, following biblical teaching, to believe that marriage has at least a quasi-sacramental character—though not when it comes to divorce and remarriage.

23: ANOINTING OF THE SICK

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

The anointing of the sick is not a sacrament, even though the Bible attests to it in multiple places.

In the anointing of the sick, a priest or bishop anoints the sick person with blessed oil and prays over him for the Holy Spirit to heal his body and soul. Although it is rooted in Scripture, the Reformers ended this practice, curiously giving different reasons for the decision.

The End of the Anointing

Martin Luther argued that since people who received it during his day were typically on their deathbed, and most did not recover from their illness, it could not be a true sacrament. (If it were, he reasoned, God would heal every person who received it.) As we have seen, he also rejected the book of James (in which can be found some scriptural support for the sacrament) as uninspired, and even when he assumed for the sake of argument that James was canonical, he nonetheless believed that an apostle had no right to “create” a sacrament. He also claimed that the Gospels make no mention of it.

John Calvin followed Luther in rejecting this sacrament, though he gave a different reason for doing so: he believed that God no longer worked miracles through his ministers.

But the gift of healing disappeared with the other miraculous powers which the Lord was pleased to give for a time, that it might render the new preaching of the gospel for ever wonderful. Therefore, even were we to grant that anointing was a sacrament of those powers which were then administered by the hands of the apostles, it pertains not to us, to whom no such powers have been committed.
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This type of theory falls into a theological category called dispensationalism, which divides up history into different periods, or dispensations, to try to explain why God has seemingly worked in different ways over the course of the centuries.

The vast majority of Protestant churches today do not practice the anointing of the sick. They reason that, because the Bible does not record Christ explicitly commanding its usage as he did for baptism and the Eucharist, anointing cannot be a sacrament and is at best an optional practice that a church could choose to do.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Anointing of the sick was instituted by Christ, practiced by the apostles, and intended to continue as a sacrament of God’s grace throughout the history of the Church.

Martin Luther made an error in assuming that the person’s physical recovery was the vital component of the anointing he received. Instead, the sacrament is meant first for the
spiritual
health of the person, especially for those persons who were soon to meet God (note Christ’s priorities toward the seriously ill in Matthew 9:2–7). In claiming that the Gospels don’t mention the sacrament, he ignored or embarrassingly missed Mark 6:13, where the Jesus sends the apostles out, and they anoint with oil to heal sick people.

We see clear evidence elsewhere in Scripture of the apostles administering the sacrament. For example, James 5:14–15: “Is anyone among you sick? He should summon the presbyters of the church, and they should pray over him and anoint (him) with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed any sins, he will be forgiven.” The biblical witness and the historical practice of the Church from the earliest centuries in both East and West confirm that this sacrament was apostolic and instituted by Christ. Yet the Protestant Reformers rejected it, and all of Protestantism followed after them.
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St. John Chrysostom, the eloquent Doctor of the Church, confirmed the importance of the sacrament and its connection to the role of the priesthood in the forgiveness of sins:

The priests of Judaism had power to cleanse the body from leprosy—or rather, not to cleanse it at all, but to declare a person as having been cleansed. . . . Our priests have received the power not of treating with the leprosy of the body, but with spiritual uncleanness; not of declaring cleansed, but of actually cleansing. . . . Priests accomplish this not only by teaching and admonishing, but also by the help of prayer. Not only at the time of our regeneration [in baptism], but even afterward, they have the authority to forgive sins: “Is there anyone among you sick? Let him call in the priests of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick man, and the Lord shall raise him up, and if he has committed sins, he shall be forgiven.”
⁹⁴

Calvin’s dispensational theory is almost without anything to recommend it. It is arbitrary, without foundation either in Scripture or Tradition. It is startling that one of the most influential men behind Protestantism could so cavalierly dismiss one of the seven sacraments of the Church using only his own made-up theory to do so. And yet his opinion has continued to influence Protestant theology even down to our day.

When I was an Evangelical Protestant going to a Southern Baptist church, my pastor gave a sermon in which he recounted his experience of being asked by a hospitalized church member to come and pray over him and anoint him with oil. The church member explicitly mentioned James 5 as the biblical precedent for the request. My pastor said, “Sure enough, I looked it up, and it’s right there in the Bible just like he said. So I didn’t really know what to do, but I went to the hospital and took some oil with me, and then, well, I poped him!”

This last statement was accompanied by the pastor making the gesture of the sign of the Cross. Raucous laughter and applause from the congregation followed. (I might have found it funny, too, had I not recently begun to consider that the Catholic Church’s claims might be true and therefore that this sacrament being joked about might in fact be something ordained by God.) This Baptist church claims the Bible alone as the sole source of revelation and rule of faith, yet my pastor had never done what James said, right in the Bible, that he should do.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then anointing of the sick is not a sacrament. Catholic and Orthodox Christians have been smearing oil on sick people’s heads for centuries in futility, erroneously believing the biblical passages that say it will forgive their sins.

24: THE EUCHARIST

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Christ may be present somehow in the Eucharist, or it may be a purely symbolic and even optional ritual. Or it may be a demonic form of idolatry.

Infant baptism is one polarizing issue for Protestantism. The Eucharist is another. What did Jesus mean by, “This is my body?” Catholics (and Orthodox) believe that he really meant it, and that the bread and wine become his real body and blood. Protestants took a wide range of divergent positions on it, the only commonality among them being the condemnation of what the Catholics believed. Although some Protestant beliefs on the Eucharist—such as traditional Lutheranism—are relatively close to that of Catholicism, most others hold to a purely symbolic understanding and look aghast upon Catholics who prostrate themselves before a piece of bread.

Is This My Body?

Luther took Jesus at his word, but he rejected the philosophical underpinnings of the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation in favor of something called sacramental union, the idea that Jesus is present
with
or
beside
the bread and wine. Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer, broke from the Catholic Church and from Luther by declaring the equally novel idea that the Eucharist merely
signifies
Christ’s body. Calvin, as usual, tried to steer a path in between his two predecessors.

Luther and Zwingli met early on in their respective reformations to try to come to an agreement on the Eucharist, but neither would budge. They utterly failed to agree, to compromise, or even to find common ground on which to move forward with discussions. Luther trenchantly observed that if, when Jesus said “This is my body,” he didn’t in some real way
mean
“This is my body,” then it is impossible for anyone to accurately interpret the scriptures. Since Luther taught the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, the error couldn’t be that the Bible was not clear but that others (such as Zwingli) interpreted its clear words wrongly.

John Calvin believed that the Lord’s Supper was more than just a symbol, yet he differentiated himself from Luther by coming up with his own interpretation of our Lord’s words and their meaning:

We begin now to enter on the question so much debated, both anciently and at the present time—how we are to understand the words in which the bread is called the body of Christ, and the wine his blood. This may be disposed of without much difficulty, if we carefully observe the principle which I lately laid down, viz., that all the benefit which we should seek in the Supper is annihilated if Jesus Christ be not there given to us as the substance and foundation of all. That being fixed, we will confess, without doubt, that to deny that a true communication of Jesus Christ is presented to us in the Supper, is to render this holy sacrament frivolous and useless—an execrable blasphemy unfit to be listened to.
⁹⁵

Calvin stressed that Christ communicates himself to us through the Eucharist, earlier in this same treatise asserting that, in the sacrament, “the Lord displays to us all the treasures of his spiritual grace.”
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But, lest an unwary reader think Calvin was sympathetic to Catholic Eucharistic theology, the Reformer went on to denounce in polemical terms the doctrines of transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the Mass.
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Calvin rejected in no uncertain terms the Catholic dogma of the Real Presence.