The Protestant's Dilemma (16 page)

The situation today in Protestantism is no clearer. The spiritual descendants of each of the Reformers generally hold to the position of their forefather. Lutherans and Anglicans hold a weekly service that is liturgical and always includes a celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The Eucharist for them is more than a symbol (while remaining less than the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence). Presbyterians and Reformed Protestants, following Calvin, hold to his covenantal view of the Lord’s Supper, which again is more than a mere symbol, but different from the Lutheran notion of sacramental union.

But the majority of Protestants belong to the Evangelical, non-denominational, or Pentecostal strains and so believe that the Lord’s Supper is simply a memorial and nothing more (though, it should be said, nothing less). Theologian Craig Blaising enunciates the Evangelical position on the Lord’s Supper well:

Historically, Baptists have reacted to sacramental views of grace which they argue are not biblical. Baptists believe that Zwingli was basically correct in seeing a metaphorical intent in the Lord’s remarks at the Last Supper. . . . Baptists see no justification in Scripture for connecting grace to anything other than the direct gift of God to personal faith directed to his Word of promise. There is no doubt that a sacramental view of the Eucharist did develop through the early centuries of the Church so that a Real Presence view
came to be found within
church teaching. But Baptists do not believe this was in fact the view of the New Testament churches.
⁹⁸

Blaising believes that the Real Presence was a heretical teaching that arose within the Church along with many others. But unlike other heresies that were rightly condemned, the Real Presence became instead enshrined as the orthodox belief. Although Blaising does not go so far as to call Catholics bread-worshipers, some Evangelical Protestants
⁹⁹
do take that step. From their perspective, the communion matter does not become Christ’s body and blood, so Catholics kneeling down before mere matter and adoring it as if it were Jesus is a most disgusting form of idolatry.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Christ is really present in the Eucharist, just as he said.

“This is my body.” Jesus could not have been any clearer; and yet, to the Reformers and to Protestants after them, it evidently wasn’t clear enough. Rather than re-treading ground well covered by other Catholic apologists regarding Scripture and the Eucharist,
¹⁰⁰
I would like to offer a brief explanation of the biblical passage that tipped the scales in my own mind on the Real Presence.

In John 6, the Bread of Life discourse, Jesus explains that he is the living bread that came down from heaven, bread that a man can eat and live forever. Up until verse 51, a purely figurative interpretation of his words seems possible. “Believing in Jesus” is the work he wants us to do,
¹⁰¹
so eating his flesh must simply be another way of saying, albeit in a strange way, that we have to believe in him. But from verse 53 to 54 and onward, in answer to the confusion expressed by the Jews at his words, Jesus does something very odd (if Protestantism is true, and the Eucharist is figurative): He makes the eating of his flesh even
more
graphic by using a different word
¹⁰²
for eating, rendered as the Greek
trogo,
denoting an animal-like gnawing. In the subsequent verses, he doubles down on this more primal way of eating by continuing to use
trogo
:

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.
¹⁰³

Jesus must have known that his listeners would rebel at these words, given God’s injunction in the Old Covenant against consuming blood.
¹⁰⁴
And his followers did what he must have expected them to do: They left
en masse
. So much so that he turned to the Twelve, as if they were the only ones who remained, and asked if they, too, would abandon him over this teaching. If he had been using a mere figure of speech, he would have consoled his disciples by telling them so. It would have made no sense to drive them away by leading them to believe something that he did not mean.
¹⁰⁵
And so the ancient Church’s teaching on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist harmonizes perfectly with the Bread of Life discourse; Protestantism’s dissenting opinions on it do not.

Reading the Church Fathers and other early Christians, Zwingli’s purely symbolic notion of the Eucharist (shared by most Evangelicals today) is nowhere to be found. Instead we find widespread profession of the Catholic dogma of the Real Presence. Luther certainly knew this fact, being well-versed in early Christian writings, which is no doubt one reason why his teaching of sacramental union was, at least on paper, very close to the Catholic Church’s understanding of the Eucharist.

Take Ignatius of Antioch, for example, who lived during the apostolic age and died in the first decade of the 100s. He wrote against the Docetist heretics, who taught that Jesus only
appeared
to be a truly flesh-and-blood human being:

Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God. . . . They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which that Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.
¹⁰⁶

In the second and third centuries, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, and Cyprian of Carthage likewise all attested to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Perhaps no other doctrine presents as decisive a litmus test as does the Eucharist: Either the Church for fifteen centuries was right, or one of the Reformers was. Each Reformer confidently presented his own opinion as divine truth, with Calvin even claiming that the question “may be disposed of without much difficulty.” Really? Humility would suggest extreme caution to anyone who chose to contradict the Church’s universal teaching on such an essential issue, yet instead we get Calvin’s cavalier brashness. Luther likewise presented his innovation as patently true, and Zwingli as well.

Christ’s words indicate that eating his flesh and drinking his blood is a matter directly concerning one’s salvation—it’s not an area where wide theological speculation is acceptable. Yet in Protestantism today the beliefs range all over, a multi-headed Hydra of private judgment that leaves honest inquirers bewildered as to what they should believe about it. No certainty can be found here except through individual bosom-burning, and such subjective feelings are too ephemeral to be trustworthy, especially with salvation at stake. The only universal commonality among the various Protestant Eucharistic theologies is the inexorable conclusion that, in believing Christ is really present in the Eucharist, Catholics are idolaters who worship bread and wine. And since the early Church taught this same Catholic doctrine early on, Christians for untold centuries were idolaters as well.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
the Church has demonstrated, once again, that its beliefs were corrupted from early on and that it cannot be trusted to teach the truth on any matter of faith. For over a thousand years, nearly all Christians bowed in worship before mere bread and wine, wrongly thinking Jesus was there. Only in the 1500s was the true teaching on the Eucharist recovered. But who can say whether that true teaching belonged to Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin?

25: CONFESSION

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

The power that Jesus gave men to forgive sins died with the apostles.

For Protestants, it seems clear from the New Testament that God forgives sin directly, without agents or intermediaries. The whole point of Jesus’ becoming man, after all, was to reveal to us that we now had direct access to God. Matthew’s Gospel describes the temple veil being torn in two at Christ’s death, demonstrating that the separation between man and God was now overcome. Further, nowhere in the Bible is there an explicit description of the Catholic confession ritual. Sacramental confession may have been an ancient practice, but this was simply another corruption in the early Church.

Sacrament Retained, Sacrament Discarded

At first, Luther actually retained the sacrament of confession, along with the Eucharist and baptism. But since it depended on an ordained clergy, and one of Luther’s key points was the rejection of any distinction between clergy and laity, he ultimately decided that the sacrament had to go. The rest of Protestantism, as it had done on so many other fundamental doctrines, followed his lead.

Perhaps above all others, this sacrament incenses Protestants, who believe that since only God forgives sin, going to a mere human being to receive forgiveness is unbiblical. True, John 20:21–23 seems to support it:

(Jesus) said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

But many Protestants interpret this passage as saying that when
we proclaim the gospel to people
we are in effect declaring that their sins are forgiven (if they accept it) or declaring that God has not forgiven them (if they reject it). Similarly, to them the passages where Jesus gives the apostles authority to “bind and loose” (Matt. 16:19, 18:18) are about declaring what God has already decided in heaven. Thus God does not use people as agents for forgiving sins; rather we’re just messengers of the forgiveness that God grants.

Other Protestants find that interpretation to be a stretch and claim that God
did
use the apostles as instruments of forgiveness of sins but that this ability was given only to the apostles. When the last one died, the power of forgiveness died with him. (This is another dispensational theory, like Calvin’s rejection of anointing of the sick).

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

God chooses to work through man, to share the gospel, to be his hands and feet, and even to forgive sins.

In the sacrament of confession, the repentant Christian confesses his sins to a priest, and the priest, acting with Christ’s divine authority, forgives him and reconciles him to Christ’s Church (which he wounded by his sin). It must be understood aright that it is God who forgives sins, but, as he does in so many other ways, God chooses to communicate his grace through human instruments. Scripture indeed teaches that only God can forgive sin; on this Catholics agree with Protestants. But Scripture also teaches that he shares this divine authority with his chosen human ministers.

Protestant interpretations of John 20:21–23, although not completely outside the realm of possibility, are not the most straightforward way to understand the passage. What if it simply means what it clearly says, and nothing more or less? The Bible says that Jesus gave his apostles the power to forgive sins, and neither Scripture nor common sense leads us to conclude that this power disappeared in the first century.

Unsurprisingly, this is exactly how the early Christians seemed to understand it. St. Ambrose wrote in the 300s about confession and the power God gives to priests to forgive (or not forgive) sins in his name:

Consider, too, the point that he who has received the Holy Ghost has also received the power of forgiving and of retaining sin. For thus it is written: Receive the Holy Spirit: whosesoever sins you forgive, they are forgiven unto them, and whosesoever sins you retain, they are retained. . . . The office of the priest is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and his right it is specially to forgive and to retain sins.
¹⁰⁷