The Protestant's Dilemma (22 page)

Based on this authority question, this books claims that the Protestant Reformation was not justified. I now ask that my Protestant sisters and brothers seriously consider how they might defend their own justification for it. Modern-day spiritual descendants of the Reformers must explain why their schisms were not schisms, or, if they were, why these schisms are justified when no others before them were.

Every Christian seeker of truth must also be convinced on two points: first, that the fullness of the portion of universal truth that Christ has revealed to us
can
indeed be discovered. (If it were otherwise, why would God go to the trouble of revealing himself to us in the first place?) Since God desires that we know the truth, he must have made it possible for us to find it and for it to be preserved from falsehoods. Secondly, that there is no “secret knowledge” that saves us. The final judgment will be of our hearts, not our knowledge base. Therefore, any search for Christian truth should be accompanied by a level of peace as we rest in the goodness of God our Father, who loves us with an everlasting love.

Authority Is God’s Intention

Part of the appeal of the Protestant idea that the Bible is the ultimate authority is the seeming simplicity of it: Any literate person can pick up the Bible and read it (once it has been translated into his language), interpret it himself, and come to know divine truth. What could be better? And having it written down protects it from being corrupted like “tradition” can be. In our modern age of widespread literacy, interpreting the Bible for ourselves, meeting at our local church with other like-minded Christians, and electing our pastor (or unelecting him if deemed necessary) seems like a great way to be a Christian. Indeed, God can work through such ways of coming to know him; he clearly has.

The problem with this conception of “the Church” and of Christianity is that it is not how God
intended
us to know him. He provided a means for
all
people to know him, even before the relatively recent age of widespread literacy and the ability to print books—a time period that still represents the minority of the Christian epoch. God played a cruel joke on humanity if he intended all Christians throughout history to be like modern Protestants and know the truths of the Faith by “reading their Bibles” (which they didn’t have, since Bibles were handwritten and extremely expensive, and which they couldn’t have read anyway, because most were illiterate).

God knew this reality, of course, which is why he entrusted the truth to rightful leaders of his Church, the men he poured his life into: the apostles. Those then chose worthy men to succeed them, to preserve and deepen the understanding of this truth within Christ’s Church—including understanding of Sacred Scripture—by the power and protection of the Holy Spirit.

Christ has called all of us to be saints—men and women in every century, whether literate or illiterate, learned or ignorant. But he
hasn’t
called us all to reinvent the Church for ourselves. He has given intellectual gifts to those he has called to be priests, bishops, and theologians so that, guided by him, they could teach the Faith to all Christians, preach to those who had not yet heard of Christ, and defend the truth from the heresies that assaulted it in every age. Are the laity
also
called to teach, preach, and defend? By all means! But to define, detract, and detour? No.

Interpretation vs. Authority

In my years of engaging in ecumenical dialogue with other Christians, one thing has become obvious: Even seemingly clear biblical passages can be challenged and interpreted differently by well-meaning Christians who view them through their particular lens.

This is the case among Catholics as well as Protestants. But since Protestants believe that the Bible is the ultimate authority, there’s no arbiter to say if certain interpretation is indeed flawed. To most Protestants, their interpretation of the Bible is what the Bible says.

The truth is that the Bible can support multiple interpretive paradigms, even conflicting ones (just ask Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the Anabaptists). So, although I have used many Bible verses to help explain Catholic teaching, the focus of this book is not so much on those verses as on authority itself, and the consequences of following the Protestant model of authority versus the Catholic one. Rather than waste time arguing who is interpreting the Bible correctly on some specific issue, we must get to the root of this fundamental question. For although it is valuable to use Bible verses to support a point, ultimately a Christian (or anyone) accepts or rejects a belief based on how he answers the more foundational question: Who is the authority here?

Jesus himself gives us the confidence that in seeking him we will find him, who is the Truth and ultimate Authority: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt. 7:7–8). May Christ bless and guide your search to find and worship him in spirit and in truth (see John 4:23), and may he unite us all as one in the fullness of the truth.

ENDNOTES

1 John Calvin: Reply to Sadoleto, Translation by Henry Beveridge in John Calvin, Tracts Relating to the Reformation, Volume 1, p. 49 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844).

2 See 1 Cor. 12:12–31; Col. 1:18, 2:18–20; Eph. 1:22–23, 3:19, 4:13.

3 Vincent of Lerins, Notebooks 3:5.

4
http://www.devinrose.heroicvirtuecreations.com/blog/2009/08/28/monergism-arminianism-synergism-and-the-bible/comment-page-1/#comment-59352

5 Warren Carroll, The Founding of Christendom: A History of Christendom, Volume 1 (Front Royal: Christendom Press, 1993), chapter 17. This chapter covers the missionary journeys of the apostles during the first century, up through Peer’s martyrdom in Rome.

6 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 3:3.

7 Eph. 2:19–20.

8 Pope Gregory I, Papal Bull of 570.

9 Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), ch. XXXI, 4.

10 Henry Graham, Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church (Charlotte: TAN Books & Publishers, 1994), III, 2.

11 See Gen. 17:10–14.

12 See Hosea 2:23.

13 Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople to Pope Leo, 449 AD.

14 Acts of Chalcedon, session 3.

15 Some Protestants call these marks the four attributes of the Church.

16 Martin Luther, On the Councils and the Church, Part II.

17 Eph. 4:1–6.

18 Eph. 5:25–27.

19 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 830.

20 Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, 8.

21 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 26.

22 Armstrong, John H. (2010-03-04). Your Church Is Too Small: Why Unity in Christ’s Mission Is Vital to the Future of the Church (Kindle Locations 867–872). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

23 This does not mean that the Church “damned him to hell.” Excommunication is a medicinal discipline intended to encourage the recipient to critically and prayerfully examine their teachings and actions so that they might return to full communion with Christ’s Church. See Matt. 18:15–20 and 1 Cor. 5:1–13.

24 From Luther’s German translation of the New Testament, first edition: http://www.bible-researcher.com/antilegomena.html

25 Luther’s Works, vol. 35 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), 395-399.

26 Modern-day Protestants, thankfully, tend to engage an opposite approach, submitting their ideas to Scripture, but this is only after accepting the canon crafted by the Reformers and thus influenced by their opinions.

27
http://www.bible-researcher.com/antilegomena.html

28 The scholarly opinion on whether this Jewish council at Jamnia really existed and, if so, decided the Jewish canon has shifted over the past decades, and now most scholars reject that theory. The consensus is now that the Jews closed their canon closer to the end of the second century A.D.

29 Vander Heeren, A. (1912). Septuagint Version. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved September 20, 2009 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13722a.htm

30 http://www.thesacredpage.com/2006/03/loose-canons-development-of-old.html

31 http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/sirach/intro.htm

32 He decided to follow “the judgment of the churches”:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf203.vi.xii.ii.xxvii.html

33 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, vii.1, 2, 5, John T. McNeill, ed., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, pp. 75–76, 80.

34 R. C. Sproul, “Now That’s a Good Question!” (Nelson, 1996), p. 81–82. (Note that some attribute this idea to John Gerstner, of whom Sproul was a student.

35 Sproul concedes this point and tries to explain how he reconciles his beliefs on the Ligonier website, which is an organization he founded to spread Reformed Protestantism’s understanding of the Gospel: http://www.ligonier.org/learn/qas/we-talk-bible-being-inspired-word-god-would-men-wh/

36 Several friends of mine, Protestant and formerly Protestant (now Catholic), have expressed their confusion over Sproul’s statement, as have many who’ve commented on ecumenical blogs. They realize how nonsensical it is, since certainty cannot rest on doubt.

37 Called the Marburg Colloquy, a meeting at Marburg Castle in Hesse, Germany in early October, 1529. The transcript of the meeting can be found here: http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/OneItem.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3163

38 Modalism is the idea that the Father, Son, and Spirit are different modes of the one God. It has ancient roots in the third century with the heretic Sabellius.

39 See 1 Peter 2:5–9.

40 I first ran across the idea of sanctified common sense (or intuition) in Evangelical scholar Mark Noll’s writings, notably The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Eerdmans, 1994.

41 See especially Heb. 13:17 and also the numerous passages where St. Paul and other apostles authoritatively teach (e.g., Acts 15) and make decisions which the other Christian faithful are expected to follow.

42 This distinction is drawn from the same epistle as those two passages: 1 John 5:16–17.

43 John Armstrong, Your Church is Too Small, Ch. 3, Zondervan, 2010.

44 McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 69–70.

45 Keith Mathison, “Solo Scriptura: The Difference a Vowel Makes” 25–29, http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=articledisplay&var1=ArtRead&var2=19&var3=authorbio&var4=AutRes&var5=17

46 For a comprehensive rebuttal of Mathison’s argument, see the Called to Communion article: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/11/solo-scriptura-sola-scriptura-and-the-question-of-interpretive-authority/

47 McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 221.

48 Matt. 16:18.

49 Jn. 14:26, 15:26.

50 See Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem.

51 Luke 10:16, Matt. 28:18–20, Matt. 10:1.

52 Jn. 16:13.

53 McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 177.

54 Ibid. p. 176. To support these claims, McGrath references Gustav Warneck’s research in the late 1800s, which has not been rebutted.

55 Ibid., p. 177.

56 Quoted in Evangelii Nuntiandi, 14, from the “Declaration of the Synod Fathers,” 4: L’Osservatore Romano (27 October 1974), p. 6.

57 Apostolicam Actuositatem, 3.

58 Westminster Confession of Faith, I.VI.

59 “I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.”

60 Dei Verbum, 4.

61 Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 63.

62 William Webster, The Church of Rome at the Bar of History (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth, 1997), 134.

63 A very readable introduction to these earliest Fathers can be found in Rod Bennet’s wonderful book Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words, Ignatius Press, 2002.