The Protestant's Dilemma (17 page)

Hippolytus, Tertullian, Origen, and many other early Christians confirmed the practice of sacramental confession to a priest.

It must be noted that this is God’s
ordinary
means of bestowing the grace of forgiveness. A Protestant who wholeheartedly and humbly confesses his sins as he has been taught to confess (which varies greatly within Protestantism) doesn’t necessarily miss out on forgiveness. God is never bound by his own designs. At the very least, though, the Protestant does miss out on the peace that Catholics enjoy as they leave the confessional with the freedom of knowing that they have been forgiven.

Catholics can agree that the temple veil’s being torn in two does demonstrate that, through Christ, we now have direct access to God. In no way can this be construed to mean, however, that God then quit using men as instruments of salvation. If anything, Christ’s Incarnation suggests the opposite. God chose to save us through a man, the God-Man, providing us a supreme example of human cooperation with divine grace.

Finally, we should recognize that sacramental confession does not rule out confessing our sins privately to God as well. Catholics can and do directly pray to God daily and have a relationship with him, but this relationship is not just about “me and Jesus.” It involves the Body of Christ, the Church, and it honors Jesus’ decision to work through people to administer grace.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
even though the Bible says Jesus gave men the power to forgive sins, and the early Church exercised this power, the sacrament of confession was an evil perversion only done away with in the sixteenth century when the Protestant Reformers rejected it. Christians for 1,500 years lived under the delusion that when they confessed their sins to a priest, they were truly forgiven by God, when in reality they were placing their trust in a false human tradition that imperiled countless millions of souls.

26: HOLY ORDERS AND APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Anyone who accurately interprets and teaches from the Bible has authority in Christ’s Church.

The Catholic Church teaches that a validly ordained priest or bishop is necessary for the administration of several of the sacraments: anointing of the sick, the Eucharist, confirmation, confession, and holy orders—the sacrament by which a man becomes a deacon, priest, or bishop. But although the early Church believed that holy orders transmitted authority from the apostles to their successors, Protestants assume that at some point this line of authority was corrupted and broken. The Reformers, in recovering the true, biblical gospel of Jesus, received authority to proclaim the truth, and so do all Bible-believing Protestants to this day.

Apostolicity=Authority

Martin Luther rejected the distinction between clergy and laity under the banner of “the priesthood of all believers,” and so he rejected the sacrament of holy orders. In doing so, he also rejected the doctrine that Christ’s divine authority is transmitted through apostolic succession. Recognizing this foundational doctrine, the Catholic Church teaches that it takes a validly ordained bishop to ordain another bishop. But how did the ordaining bishop get ordained? From another validly ordained bishop, following a line that goes back to the apostles themselves, who were ordained by Jesus Christ. This authority was then transmitted to the apostles’ successors, as it was to Matthias (who replaced Judas in Acts 1:26) and the first bishops (such as Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:14). The direct line of authority continues to the current bishops today of the Catholic Church (as well as the Orthodox churches, which have kept the succession unbroken).

Luther knew that he had to reject apostolic succession; otherwise he could not justify causing a schism from the Church and establishing another church based on his own authority. At the same time he needed plausible justification for that authority. So he and the other Reformers posited a new idea: that authority is given by God to whoever teaches the true gospel—a doctrine sometimes called
apostolicity
.
¹⁰⁸
This broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly on apostolic authority and opened up that authority to Luther, Calvin, the Anabaptists—to anyone, really, who thought that he was teaching the truth from the Bible.

The Reformers were appalled by the behavior of Catholic clergy, some of whom were corrupt and worldly. They also thought that Catholics had twisted the gospel beyond recognition. We can understand why they rejected the idea that Catholic bishops retained rightful authority in Christ’s Church. Christ
must
have revoked authority from them long ago, when corruptions began to pollute the true gospel. Protestants today use this same reasoning today to reject the teaching that apostolic succession is the means by which divine authority was transmitted to the leaders of the Church.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Christ gave divine authority to the apostles, and they in turn to their successors, continuing one bishop to another down through the ages.

Which idea is right: apostolic succession or apostolicity? Let’s consider a few passages from early Christians, beginning with one from Augustine, the great Church Father respected by Catholics and Reformers alike:

For if the lineal succession of bishops is to be taken into account, with how much more certainty and benefit to the Church do we reckon back till we reach Peter himself, to whom, as bearing in a figure the whole Church, the Lord said: “Upon this rock will I build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it!” The successor of Peter was Linus, and his successors in unbroken continuity were these: Clement, Anacletus, Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus . . . Damasus, and Siricius, whose successor is the present Bishop Anastasius.
¹⁰⁹

Clement, the close successor to Peter himself, wrote within the first century:

The apostles have preached the gospel to us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ [has done so] from God. Christ therefore was sent forth by God, and the apostles by Christ. Both these appointments, then, were made in an orderly way, according to the will of God. . . . And thus preaching through countries and cities, they appointed the first fruits [of their labors], having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe. Nor was this any new thing, since indeed many ages before it was written concerning bishops and deacons. For thus says the Scripture in a certain place, “I will appoint their bishops in righteousness, and their deacons in faith.” Our apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be strife on account of the office of the episcopate. For this reason, therefore, inasmuch as they had obtained a perfect foreknowledge of this, they appointed those [ministers] already mentioned, and afterwards gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry.
¹¹⁰

These are only two examples of the many writings of the early Christians attesting to apostolic succession and the ministerial priesthood. Prior to the Reformation, the Protestant notion of apostolicity was a foreign concept. But since Protestants do not have valid succession from the apostles, they must reject holy orders as the sacrament by which divine authority is transmitted to men, by Christ, through other ordained men.

The lack of holy orders and apostolic succession creates a vacuum of authority in Protestantism. Enter apostolicity to fill it, as a necessary corollary to
sola scriptura
. The Bible alone is the sole infallible rule of faith, and no person or group of people is protected from error by God in interpreting Scripture, so every Protestant is his own ultimate interpretive authority. Naturally, he thinks his interpretation of Scripture is substantially correct, and he follows those Protestant pastors and scholars who agree with his interpretation. These men and women, he reasons, must be the ones with authority, because they are teaching God’s truth to others. And he himself also has this authority because he shows others how his interpretation of the Bible is true.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, offers a striking contrast between God’s work of apostolic succession and the self-appointment that is at the heart of apostolicity:

This is precisely what we mean when we call ordination of priests a sacrament: ordination is not about the development of one’s own powers and gifts. It is not the appointment of a man as a functionary because he is especially good at it, or because it suits him . . . it is not a question of a job in which someone secures his own livelihood by his own abilities, perhaps in order to rise later to something better. Sacrament means: I give what I myself cannot give; I do something that is not my work; I am on a mission and have become the bearer of that which another has committed to my charge. Consequently, it is also impossible for anyone to declare himself a priest or for a community to make someone a priest by its own
fiat
. One can receive what is God’s only from the sacrament, by entering into the mission that makes me the messenger and instrument of another.
¹¹¹

Protestant communities view their ministers, who are “ordained” by the fiat of the community and not through a sacrament, as functionaries rather than as persons specially configured to Christ through holy orders. This flawed conception represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that God instituted rightful authority in his Church.

What of the idea that clerical immorality was a sign that God had withdrawn authority from the Church? Well, the leaders of God’s Church have always been sinners. Some have followed Christ more faithfully than others, but none has been perfect. So it’s impossible to support the claim that sinful bishops must have lost their authority. The apostles themselves would have been excluded by such a criterion!

The charge that they lost authority when they began teaching a corrupted gospel seems to have more merit. But this just begs the question. For who, exactly, has the authority from God to discern the true gospel from a corrupted one? Who can correctly interpret the data of divine revelation? And how would the rest of us know?

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
any man or woman intelligent and faithful enough to correctly interpret Scripture has authority from God. But Protestants judge their pastors’ interpretations of the Bible against their own interpretation, which may very well be erroneous, so they can never be sure of who has true authority in the Church. Catholics can know who has rightful authority based on the orderly succession of bishops, from the early Church down through today.

27: SEXUAL MORALITY

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Sexual morality is culturally conditioned and thus subject to change.

All Christian churches once recognized homosexual behavior as a sinful aberration. Today, many Protestant groups not only accept such behavior as normal, they endorse (even conduct) same-sex marriages. This is just the latest domino to fall—after contraception and premarital sex—in the collapse of traditional Protestant sexual morality, which has become ever more compromised by the spirit of the age.

A Sea Change in Protestantism

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is the largest set of Lutheran communities in the United States with more than four million members. In 2009, the members of the ELCA voted to endorse clergy who are in homosexual relationships, opening “the ministry of the church to gay and lesbian pastors and other professional workers living in committed relationships.”
¹¹²
In doing so, they realized they were overturning centuries of Bible-based Christian moral teaching, but they believed that Jesus wants them to do so, as a matter of justice and equality for all people. The ELCA was following in the footsteps of the Episcopal Church, which had ordained an open homosexual as bishop in 2003, and which adopted a resolution in 2009 to allow individual bishops to decide whether to bless same-sex unions, and would three years later designate an official liturgy for such blessings. With civil law throughout the Western world rapidly redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, many other Protestant groups have followed suit or are in a period of evolution.
¹¹³

This evolution logically follows from another historical change: Protestantism’s acceptance of contraception. Beginning with the Anglican Communion in the early twentieth century,
¹¹⁴
nearly all of Protestantism has come to embrace the idea that marriage is about sex and companionship first, procreation second. Once marriage and babies were so divorced, Protestants had no principled objection to unions of same-sex couples, who could argue that they offer each other the exact same kind of partnership that heterosexuals do.