The Protestant's Dilemma (6 page)

St. Paul writes, “[A]ll have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” because “there is none righteous, no not one” (Rom. 3:23). Every organization and institution is therefore full of people who sin. Churches aren’t exempt: How many pastors have been caught in infidelities, embezzlement, and worse? If they sin, they can err, too. As a Protestant, although I thought what my pastor taught was mostly true, I didn’t necessarily agree with everything he taught. Why should I? He was just another sinful, fallible human being like me.

Furthermore, as a Protestant I believed that the Bible taught that we had no hope of ever becoming righteous. By faith, Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us by the Father such that we appear holy, but deep down we remain sinful and corrupted people. My Protestant friends and mentors loved Isaiah 64:6, where, speaking of the Israelites, the prophet says: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.”

Filthy rags and polluted garments: That’s what human goodness amounts to.

Given the universal corruption in people and in institutions, what hubris for the Catholic Church to claim that it teaches no error! Protestant churches, I thought, are at least honest enough to recognize their fallibility. They know the Bible is true and they try to teach from the Bible—if sometimes they teach contradictory things from it, well, that’s a result of their corruption. Protestants have to give their churches only qualified or conditional assent, knowing that at any time they could leave to find one whose doctrines were less corrupted.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

The Church is both a human institution and a supernatural society, with Christ at the head.

Infallibility is a practical necessity for Christianity, because it safeguards the deposit of faith given by Christ to the apostles and first Christians. Imagine if God didn’t protect the Church from error: We would be left to our own devices to identify and preserve what Jesus taught. After 2,000 years of such fallible human activity, and the countless disagreements and divisions it inevitably produces, we could have little expectation that what was passed down to us was the pristine truth of divine revelation.

A bald-faced appeal to the Holy Spirit’s help doesn’t solve the problem, either, since the
way
in which the Spirit works would have to be given. For Protestants, the Holy Spirit primarily works within individual Christians; but the ubiquitous fractures among them make it impossible to conclude that the Holy Spirit is leading
all
of them to truth. The Holy Spirit
could
work infallibly to guide someone into the full truth of revelation, but there’s no sure way for a Protestant to say where this has happened. What practical good is that guidance if we can’t identify it?

Yet Protestants subconsciously realize the need for infallibility, through their recognition that, by inspiring fallible men to write the books of Scripture, God ensured that what was written was free from all error. Without that belief, it would make no sense to call Scripture the rule of faith for Christians, since it
could
present mere human ideas as divine truth. But they stop short of recognizing an infallible guide to
interpreting
Scripture—and so every fallible Protestant must do it himself as best as he is able, fashioning his own body of fallible doctrines to believe in.

As I continued growing in my faith and sought to refute the wild Catholic claim of infallibility, I was still bothered by the lack of unity among Christians, which was clearly against Christ’s and Paul’s commands. I investigated where we got the books of the Bible and looked at moral issues such as contraception—which I had always assumed was a good thing—where the Catholic Church contrasted with Protestantism. I found reasonable answers to my old objections and challenged my Evangelical friends with them (my argument against contraception must have felt like a bolt of lightning out of the sky), and they failed to respond with convincing answers.

I remember the day I could see that the Catholic Church’s claim of infallibility just might be true. It was similar to when I had been an atheist and one day realized that Jesus Christ might really be who he said he was
.
It was exhilarating! It meant that God had not left us alone to wallow in error. It also meant that I could actually
become
holy! Though “all” sinned and fell short of God’s glory, Jesus did not; this meant that we too could live in true freedom from the slavery of sin. Likewise, even though the Church is made up of sinful human beings, the Holy Spirit could make it not just infallible but also holy.

As a Protestant I believed that God infallibly guided sinful men to write inerrant, divine truth: the Bible. It was only one step further also to believe that throughout time God continued to guide fallible men into all truth.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
then Christian churches are no more reliable than any other human institution. Any confidence we place in a set of doctrines, therefore, is shaky; we must always take a stand with one foot out the door. Without the assurance that God has preserved the deposit of faith from error and by his Spirit guided people in every age to defend that truth, we who live two millennia after Jesus Christ cannot trust with certainty what we have been taught about him. We’re left to sift through the sparse rubble of (allegedly) historical documents and piece together a puzzle for which we don’t have the complete picture. We surely believe that God would never leave us in such a state; but if Protestantism is true, he has.

PART 2: THE BIBLE AND TRADITION

7: MARTIN LUTHER AND THE CANON

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

It’s okay to remove books from the New Testament canon if you judge them to be non-inspired.

The canon of the New Testament slowly took shape over the first 300 years of Christianity. Some books, like the four Gospels, were widely accepted early on, whereas others were doubted by many for a long time. But by the fifth century, the New Testament canon of twenty-seven books was firmly settled. In spite of this, over a thousand years later, Martin Luther dismissed four of those books when he translated the New Testament into German.

Four on the Chopping Block

Martin Luther was excommunicated in the year 1521.
²³
The following year, he published his German New Testament but relegated four of the books to the end with this preface: “Up to this point we have had to do with the true and certain chief books of the New Testament. The four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation.”
²⁴
Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation were the books whose inspiration he rejected.

Here is an excerpt from his introduction to James and Jude:

I do not regard it as the writing of an apostle; and my reasons follow. In the first place it is flatly against Paul and all the rest of Scripture in ascribing justification to works. . . . This fault, therefore, proves that this epistle is not the work of any apostle. . . . But this James does nothing more than drive to the law and to its works. . . . He mangles the Scriptures and thereby opposes Paul and all Scripture. . . . Therefore, I will not have him in my Bible to be numbered among the true chief books.

Concerning the epistle of Jude, no one can deny that it is an extract or copy of Peter’s second epistle, so very like it are all the words. He also speaks of the apostles like a disciple who comes long after them and cites sayings and incidents that are found nowhere else in the Scriptures.
²⁵

So Luther submitted the books of the Bible to his own doctrine and found them incompatible with it.
²⁶
He also judged that Jude was merely a modified copy of 2 Peter, and added his opinion that its unique sayings are further reason to reject it. Luther excoriated Revelation as well, denying that an apostle wrote it or that the Holy Spirit inspired it.
²⁷
These four books were placed in an appendix in an effort to drop them from the New Testament entirely.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

God guided the early Church to discern the New Testament, and no man afterward can change it.

It might appear at first that Luther was merely trying to be historically accurate in rejecting these books, since three of the four were not universally accepted early on in the Church. However, it is clear that Luther denied the inspiration of these books primarily for theological, not historical, reasons. Sure, the early doubts about these books made his claims more palatable. But in truth, these books either contained teachings that directly contradicted the novel doctrines he was proposing (like
sola fide
), or he simply did not think much of them.

If he had rejected them for purely historical reasons, he should have also rejected 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John, which were also not universally attested to in the first centuries of the Church. But he didn’t reject those, because he didn’t find anything in them that disagreed with his own theological opinions. His solution was to override historical concerns altogether and appeal to no authority but his own personal discernment. Even though this particular assertion of Luther’s did not carry the day, the majority of his opinions did catch on with the Protestant Reformation as a whole and formed the basis for its common doctrines.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then there is no reason why someone today could not remove any number of books from the New Testament and declare that he has come up with the true Bible, made up of whichever books coincide with his beliefs. After all, the father of the Protestant Reformation did just that to a thousand-year-old canon.

8: THE DEUTEROCANONICAL BOOKS

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

God allowed the early Church to put seven books in the Bible that didn’t belong there.

As we saw in the previous section, Martin Luther was not afraid to challenge the canon of Scripture. Though his alteration of the New Testament ultimately wasn’t adopted by all of the Protestant movements, his alteration of the Old Testament
was
, and by the end of the Reformation, Protestantism had removed seven books (the deuterocanonicals) from the Old Testament canon.

Protestants Reject the Deuterocanonicals

The Protestants rejected these books for two main reasons. The first was a problematic passage in 2 Maccabees, and the second was their desire to go “back to the sources,” which in this case meant using the same books that the Jews ultimately decided upon. 2 Maccabees included a laudatory reference to prayers for the dead—a teaching that had been encouraged in the Catholic Church for the souls in purgatory. Recall Luther’s protest against the sale of indulgences to remove the temporal punishment due for already forgiven sins—punishment that must be paid before a soul would be fit to enter heaven. Luther and the Reformers rejected purgatory, so all that was connected with it also had to go: indulgences, prayers for the dead, and the communion of saints (which includes those both living and asleep in Christ).

The Reformers pointed out that these seven books were not included in the Jewish Hebrew Bible. Some Protestant apologists seek to bolster this claim by mentioning the theory that, around the year 90, a council of Jews at a city called Jamnia explicitly rejected these books.
²⁸
Others like to point out that some Church Fathers rejected one or more of these books. They strengthen this argument with the testimony of Josephus and Philo—two Jews from the first century—who also did not accept them.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Christ’s Church, and not the Jews, possessed the authority and divine guidance to discern the Old Testament canon.

A little historical background is needed here. The first Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, used during Jesus’ time, was called the Septuagint. It was an evolving set of books that was added to from the third century B.C. until the time of Christ. It remains the most ancient translation of the Old Testament that we have today and so is used to correct the errors that crept into the Hebrew text, the oldest existing examples of which date only from the sixth century. It was used extensively in the Near East by rabbis, and in the first century the apostles quoted prophecies from it in the books that became the New Testament. It was accepted as authoritative by the Jews of Alexandria and then by all Jews in Greek-speaking countries.