The Protestant's Dilemma (18 page)

It is not just on contraception that Protestants have waffled. Even historically conservative Evangelicals are turning away from longstanding Christian opposition to fornication. In a recent survey, an astounding 80 percent of Evangelicals ages 18 to 29 claimed to have engaged in premarital sex, and a large majority were sexually active in the past year.
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This reality has prompted many Protestant leaders to take the incredible step of encouraging these unmarried Christians to use contraceptives when they have premarital sex.
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Mark Driscoll, a hugely popular Protestant mega-church pastor, wrote a sermon series on contraception (including sterilization). His statements typify the common Protestant attitude—including from conservative Evangelicals—toward these issues. He writes that methods such as “condoms . . . the diaphragm, contraceptive sponges, cervical caps, and female condoms,” in addition to sterilization procedures, “are options for Christian couples to consider.” In defending his position, he writes:

[T]here are Christians who are legalistic on this issue and declare that there is essentially never a good reason for such a permanent measure. However, life in a fallen world is complicated and painful. For example, a pastor and his wife who are good friends of mine suffered eighteen miscarriages before he had a vasectomy to stop what had become for them incredible physical and emotional pain.
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While my wife and I can sympathize with his friend who has suffered numerous miscarriages, citing the “fallen world” and its complexity is not sufficient to justify actions contrary to the Bible and the Church’s Tradition.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Sexual morality transcends time and the shifting sands of cultural opinion.

Interpreted accurately, the Bible supports the traditional norms for sexual morality. St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians that “neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts . . . will inherit the kingdom of God.”
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Jesus tells his listeners that even looking lustfully at a woman in one’s heart, let alone committing physical adultery with her—is evil. And for hundreds of years, Protestants agreed with the Catholic interpretation of these verses. That has changed.

Examining the history of contraception and same-sex acts shows us that Christians universally rejected them as immoral. Contraception was condemned by all churches and ecclesial communities until 1930. No Christian church recognized the morality of homosexual relationships or the validity of same-sex “marriages” until recent years. Premarital sex is still officially taught to be immoral by most Protestant churches, but clearly the young people in those churches aren’t receiving the message.

These radical reversals in Protestantism’s beliefs on sexual morality stem from a rejection of the natural law and their embrace of nominalism: They reject the idea that humans can recognize the nature of things, that the body has inherent meaning because it reflects the person.
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Even Protestant pastors fall to this error, because, following Protestantism’s bedrock principle of
sola scriptura
and individual interpretive authority, they choose to believe that only those practices that a Christian interprets to be explicitly condemned by the Bible are off limits. Everything else is fair game if both parties
consent
to it.

Because they hold to
sola scriptura
, Protestants can look only to the Bible itself for binding arguments for or against same-sex relationships. Though some Protestants claim to recognize Christian “tradition,” what happens in practice is that these Protestants pick and choose in an
ad hoc
way from Tradition when it suits them (for example, opposing homosexual acts) but reject that same Tradition when it does not (contraception, premarital sex, and so on). These examples provide strong evidence that the Bible was never intended to be an exhaustive manual for faith and morals.

Catholics, on the other hand, draw from Scripture
and
the Apostolic Tradition, building upon the natural law, to know truth in its fullness. The natural law can get us as far as heterosexual marriage, and Scripture and Tradition, as interpreted authoritatively by the Church’s magisterium, can reveal to us the full beauty and splendor of God’s design. The husband and wife make a total gift of themselves to each other, becoming a communion of life and love that images the communion between the divine persons of the Holy Trinity. Within the total, lifelong commitment of marriage, children find the ideal environment to learn to love.

Let’s analyze why certain sexual acts are immoral. Though at first glance they may seem unrelated, same-sex acts and contracepted sex both disconnect sexual pleasure from openness to life, to procreation. The sexual act should be one of mutual love that unites the husband and the wife and that is open to the gift of children:

Finally, this [married] love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare.”
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This fecundity is what makes the marital act self-giving. Homosexual acts and contraception are intrinsically selfish and closed in on themselves, for they can never be life-giving. And having sex before marriage risks the possibility of conceiving a child, a child who would not be given a true family structure that she deserves.

Catholics can argue in the public square, even without using Scripture, by appealing to natural law, the law written on our hearts by God himself. We can offer principled objections to same-sex “marriage,” but in doing so we also point out to our Protestant brethren that contraception and premarital sex are against our nature and against divine law. Protestantism in recent times has not only shown the failure of
sola scriptura
to uphold sexual morality but in fact has deployed arguments from (biblical) silence against Catholics and others who still hold the line against these evils.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
then traditional Christian standards of sexual morality have either been wrong for two millennia or they can change with the times. If they’ve been wrong, what other teachings could be wrong? And if they can change, what else can change?

PART 4: CHRISTIAN HISTORY AND PRACTICE

28: OTHER MORAL ISSUES

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Christian moral teachings are subject to change based on a majority vote.

For hundreds of years, Protestantism stood firmly with traditional Christian orthodoxy on all issues of morality. But in the past century, many Protestant denominations have altered (in some cases, reversed) their teachings not just on sex but also on other important moral subjects such as abortion and the indissolubility of marriage. As with sexual morality, these Protestants have employed a democratic model for discerning Christian teaching, implying that Christ’s moral teachings can change with the spirit of the age.

Protestant Reversal on Abortion and Divorce

From the Reformation until the 1960s, all Protestant groups condemned abortion as evil, but as the winds of modern society began to shift, so did Protestant teachings. It began with the Episcopal Church in 1967, when its General Convention voted to approve abortions in certain situations.
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The dominoes continued to fall over the next five years, with the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) reversing its pro-life position to support unrestricted access to abortion, the Lutheran Church in America (a precursor to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) declaring it was the decision of the woman, and the United Methodists, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and even the Southern Baptist Convention following suit.
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Some Protestants even use the Bible in an attempt to prove that life does not begin at conception. One verse used to argue for when life begins, even by Evangelicals, is Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Since it takes weeks after conception for the baby to pump blood, an argument is made that abortion before this time is acceptable.

Other Protestants go further and argue from the Bible that life does not begin until breath is drawn:

Many people think that a human being is created at the time of conception but this belief is not supported by the bible. According to the bible, a fetus is not a living person with a soul until after drawing its first breath. After God formed man in Genesis 2:7, He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and it was then that the man became a living being.” Although the man was fully formed by God in all respects, he was not a living being until after taking his first breath.
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I don’t find this logic compelling, for several reasons, but the Bible does contain verses that
could
be construed as supporting the notion that life begins weeks or even months after conception.

All of Christianity likewise once considered marriage to be an indissoluble bond, but today most Protestant communities have reversed their past teachings and permit their members to divorce and remarry. Tellingly, the first Protestants laid the shaky foundation for undermining marriage, beginning with Martin Luther and King Henry VIII. Luther was a Catholic priest, which means he had “married” the Church. Yet he broke in schism from her and then chose to marry a nun who had herself broken her vows (religious sisters are seen as being spiritually “married” to Christ). King Henry VIII drove the Church in England into schism over the desire to divorce his wife and marry another. In the well-known but tragic story that is the start of the Anglican Church, Henry VIII had two of his subsequent wives executed and divorced another.

Still, Protestantism maintained a strong respect for marriage, following the broader Christian society’s opinion. But as society changed, so did Protestantism. Without the strong foundation that marriage was an inviolable sacrament, Protestants were primed to be led astray by the spirit of the age. And so they were.

Modern wisdom views personal fulfillment as the highest good. We are encouraged to “follow our bliss,” do what’s “good for
us
,” and recognize that sometimes people “fall out of love.” When a marital relationship is no longer gratifying, divorce is seen as an acceptable and even necessary course. Secular ideologues warn us that it’s unhealthy to keep a lifelong promise when we no longer feel fulfilled by it.

Without the supernatural protection of the Holy Spirit, Protestant denominations simply have no defense against the creeping tide of secularism that the world has embraced. Protestants see abortion and divorce as, at best, necessary evils in the quest for one’s self-actualization, and at worst, handy tools for extricating oneself out of a tough situation. They’ve swallowed the modernist heresies that place the individual on a pedestal above all else.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

The Church’s moral teachings were true yesterday, today, and forever.

The Catholic Church stands today virtually alone in recognizing the immorality of contraception and sterilization. Similarly, the Church continues its unchanging witness to the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death by condemning abortion unequivocally.

One does not need to understand or accept the Church’s authority to agree with this condemnation, of course. There are many Protestants who remain pro-life on biblical grounds. In fact, even basic arguments from biology and natural law suffice to establish the immorality and injustice of abortion.

The question of divorce and remarriage, however, is less obvious. When the Protestant Reformers threw out most of the seven sacraments, they fundamentally damaged the theology behind marriage: the understanding of marriage’s nature and goods. This has unsurprisingly led to modern Protestantism’s almost univocal approval of divorce and remarriage.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has retained the theology of marriage it received from Christ and the apostles: that a true marriage between baptized persons is sacramental and indissoluble (Matt. 19:8–9). That is why it continues to preach the same hard but loving truth that Christ taught: for validly married persons to divorce and marry someone else is to commit adultery.
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