The Protestant's Dilemma (21 page)

So Protestants are not opposed to new reformations, at least in principle. But what happens when other Protestants use
their
interpretation of Scripture to arrive at reformed doctrines that you think are fundamentally unscriptural and therefore un-Christian?

One day my wife and I drove by a church building in our town and spotted its electronic marquee proclaiming the “Bishop Spong Lecture Series.” John Shelby Spong is a retired Episcopal bishop whose infamously creative heterodoxy can be discovered in his many books, in which he denies or reinvents most of the core doctrines of traditional Christianity.

Unsurprisingly, Bishop Spong sees a need for a new Reformation, and calls for it with his “twelve theses”:

Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the sixteenth-century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses that he wished to debate. . . . My theses are far smaller in number than were those of Martin Luther, but they are far more threatening theologically. The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
¹³⁵

The list continues, but I think four items will suffice to give you an idea of how radical Spong’s ideas area. Nonetheless, Spong “gets” Protestantism, and has banked on its founding principle to gain acceptance for his own reformation program. He is not an isolated case but is just one representative example of the ever-reforming face of Protestant Christianity.

Not to be outdone by Spong, after the Very Rev. Gary R. Hall became Dean of the (Episcopal) National Cathedral, he announced his own unique take on Christianity: “I don’t want to be loosey-goosey about it, but I describe myself as a non-theistic Christian.”
¹³⁶
Hall isn’t sure who Jesus is: whether he really is God or just, as Hall says, “an extraordinary human being.”
¹³⁷
And for the head of a Protestant cathedral with national significance, God is an optional part of Christianity.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Doctrines of the Faith are invulnerable to substantial revision or reversal.

Bishop Spong likens himself to Martin Luther, but would traditional, Bible-believing Protestants view his “new Reformation” as a new formulation of a Christianity that has once again lost its way? More likely they would object that
his theses are clearly false, because they deny the teachings of traditional Christian orthodoxy and the way that the Bible has been interpreted by the majority of Christians throughout the ages.

But why is that a problem? Luther’s teachings and those of the Reformation also denied many truths of traditional Christian orthodoxy, yet Protestants believe that his doctrinal “reforms” were correct and justified. After all, it is Protestantism that democratized the Church and made biblical interpretation accessible to all, such that an individual like Bishop Spong is not bound by any institutional church authority but is free to discover and denounce errors in what Christians have always believed, based on how he interprets the Bible.

Spong and Hall understand the Protestant reforming principle well. Whenever the Church seems like it is becoming out of touch with society or irrelevant, not even the most cherished teachings are safe from the reformer’s ax.

But in the Catholic paradigm, this is not so. When the Catholic Church proclaims a teaching with its full authority, that teaching is dogmatic, rendering it unchangeable. The Trinity is the Trinity forever; Unitarians need not apply. Jesus is God and man, and the phrase “non-theistic Christian” is not just oxymoronic but downright moronic. Faithful Protestants would like to claim the same thing for their beliefs, believing them to be based on authoritative and immutable scriptures, but they cannot, because history has shown that if you give a Protestant church enough time, and it will veer off into previously unthinkable heresies.

While traditional Protestants can continue to retreat into smaller and smaller enclaves that attempt to hold fast to some subset of traditional orthodoxy, the rising water will eventually reach and overtake them. Protestantism has no safeguard against it and laid the groundwork for its own undoing in its very DNA.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then there is no principled reason why Spong and Hall could not start a new Reformation that would do for the Christianity of today what Luther’s Reformation did for the Church in the 1500s, since, by Protestant acclaim, rejecting traditional doctrines can be a noble thing.

34: THE CORRUPTION OF CELIBACY

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

The ancient practice of celibacy meant the Church was corrupted from the very beginning.

Since the Reformation, all Protestant communities have categorically rejected celibacy as a discipline for their clergy. Celibate religious brothers and sisters likewise almost entirely vanished in Protestantism. Yet consecrated celibacy was practiced in the Church from the very beginning.

Celibacy Rejected

Martin Luther rejected priestly celibacy in a reaction against the Church’s distinction between clergy and laity. (The Church taught that clergy were given a special mark by God in the sacrament of holy orders.) Anglican historian Alister McGrath explains this well:

[Luther believed that the Church] is fundamentally a gathering of believers, not a divinely ordained institution with sacred powers and authority vested exclusively in its clergy. All believers, men and women, by virtue of their baptism, are priests. Luther noted an important corollary to this doctrine: the clergy should be free to marry, like all other Christians. This right to clerical marriage rapidly became a defining characteristic of Protestantism.
¹³⁸

Once again we see Luther’s influence upon the rest of Protestantism. He interpreted the priesthood of all believers to mean that no distinction existed between clergy and laity—and so clergy should be allowed to marry. Luther encouraged monks and nuns to abandon their vows, following his own example, and he soon married a former nun.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Celibacy for the kingdom was and is a divinely ordained practice to which some members of Christ’s Church are called.

It might seem surprising that the practices of celibacy and consecrated virginity for the sake of the kingdom could be considered reasons
in favor
of the Catholic Church. Yet it is so. The basis for Catholicism’s teachings on celibacy come straight from Jesus and St. Paul. Jesus addresses the question in Matthew’s Gospel:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” He said to them, “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery.” The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.” But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it” [Matt. 19:1–12].

If this passage’s meaning seems unclear to us today, we can look to what the early Christians taught about this part of Matthew 19. In the fourth century Gregory Nazianzen wrote,

Marriage is honorable; but I cannot say that it is more lofty than virginity; for virginity were no great thing if it were not better than a good thing. . . . A mother she is not, but a Bride of Christ she is. The visible beauty is not hidden, but that which is unseen is visible to God. All the glory of the king’s daughter is within, clothed with golden fringes, embroidered whether by actions or by contemplation. And she who is under the yoke [of marriage], let her also in some degree be Christ’s; and the virgin altogether Christ’s. Let the one be not entirely chained to the world (Luke 8:14), and let the other not belong to the world at all. . . . Have you chosen the life of angels?
¹³⁹

Such passages from the writings of the Church Fathers could be reproduced many times over. Although there is no explicit scriptural command for priests to be celibate (and in the Eastern Catholic tradition, married men can be ordained), the practice of celibacy among the earliest Christians offers compelling testimony to how Christ’s words were understood.

St. Paul was one such celibate, and he commends virginity for the sake of the kingdom in 1 Corinthians:

I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband (1 Cor. 7:7–8, 32–34, NIV).

We saw earlier that Protestants’ rejection of celibacy for the kingdom comes not from the Bible which commends the practice, but from following a tradition begun by Martin Luther in his reaction against some abuses of clerical power. Luther overreacted to these abuses and threw out the baby with the bathwater, and all Protestantism followed suit. It is fair to ask, however, why we should follow the tradition of Martin Luther over the words of Christ and Paul?

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then even though Jesus established celibacy for the kingdom, and Paul affirmed it in his own life and exhorted others to it, and the Holy Spirit made this vocation within the Church fruitful for centuries, in reality it was a corrupted practice that needed to be reformed more than 1,500 years later.

FOLLOW THE TRAIL OF AUTHORITY

For every argument that has been made in this book, a Protestant apologist could attempt a response, perhaps more eloquent and well-presented than mine. The very existence of this debate, continuing now for almost five centuries, underscores the need for each Christian to methodically explore the arguments in order to discern, with God’s help and with much prayer and humility, where the fullness of the truth resides.

Lack of centralized authority is Protestantism’s Achilles’s heel, and the arguments of this book strike at it. Every difference between Catholics and Protestants ultimately stems from their beliefs about the source of God-given human authority in this world. Protestants claim that a set of sixty-six ancient books is the sole infallible authority. For them, the Church is a friendly gathering of believers, all of whom effectively have authority to interpret the Bible for themselves. Catholics, on the other hand, claim that God established his Church with divine authority passed on man to man, beginning with the original apostles and continuing today through the bishops, to teach and understand the truth, which he gave to her in the deposit of faith.