The Protestant's Dilemma

THE

PROTESTANT’S

DILEMMA

HOW THE REFORMATION’S SHOCKING CONSEQUENCES POINT TO THE TRUTH OF CATHOLICISM

Devin Rose

SAN DIEGO

2014

The Protestant’s Dilemma

How the Reformation’s Shocking Consequences Point to the Truth of Catholicism

© 2014 by Devin Rose

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Unless otherwise noted, biblical citations are taken from the Revised Standard

Version of the Bible (© 1971 by Division of Christian Education of the National

Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of Amverica).

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TO MY WIFE, KATIE

FOREWORD

Dialogue That Seeks Truth

Among the many profound teachings we have been blessed with from the Second Vatican Council, there is one that is particularly profound—though it was not really so much an individual teaching as a theme. That theme could be summed up by the word “dialogue.”

The term was introduced in Pope Paul VI’s 1964 encyclical,
Ecclesiam Suam
, and from there the term found its way into the documents of Vatican II and into the very life of the Church.

By “dialogue,” our Holy Father, and the Council, did not mean to reduce the Catholic Church to the level of “one voice among many equals” with regard to the possession of truth.
Lumen Gentium
14 declared:

This Sacred Council… teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation. Christ, present to us in His Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation. In explicit terms He Himself affirmed the necessity of faith and baptism and thereby affirmed also the necessity of the Church, for through baptism as through a door men enter the Church. Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.

“Dialogue” is a dynamic term calling all of us as Catholics to enter into a real back-and-forth with all of humanity, grounded in Jesus Christ as God’s “dialogue” with the world in the Incarnation. In Christ, God reveals the truth of who he is and who we are, but he also invites a response… a
dialogue
.

Liturgically, we Catholics understand this notion of dialogue well, even if not by that appellation. In the liturgy, God both speaks to us and we speak back to God. And we do not do so as mere puppets on a heavenly string. The many rites and churches within our Catholic communion speak back to God in many different languages and with differing nuances while never diminishing in the least the essential truths of the Faith—our Catholic identity.

The Council fathers, following Pope Paul VI’s lead, invited us to expand our understanding of dialogue. and to invite the entire world into that dialogue as Christ’s ambassadors. That means first to engage our own members in full communion with the Catholic Church. But it does not stop there, any more than Christ’s communication of himself ceases at the doors of our churches. It continues in our relationships with our separated brethren who do not enjoy full communion with the Church, with those of non-Christian sects, and even with those who have no faith at all.

In this book, Devin Rose makes a valuable contribution to that dialogue, and specifically to our continuing dialogue with members of the thousands of Protestant sects. He also brings to the fore what can happen when we engage in the dialogue well. So many Catholics do not heed the Council’s call because we just don’t know how to do it. We don’t know what to say. Devin Rose lays out for us a game plan. His book is structured as talking points that help us to be able to lead a Protestant in a dialogue to consider what he probably has never considered before. He leads the Protestant to see the untenable conclusions that necessarily follow from the theology he has, very often anyway, taken for granted.

From the four marks of the Church,
sola scriptura
, and the issue of authority, to baptism, marriage and much, much more,
The Protestant’s Dilemma
presents both the Protestant position, pulling no punches in revealing the manifold theological holes in Protestant theology, and the Catholic position that alone can fill in those holes. The success of the text lies in the back-and-forth—
in the dialogue
. But it is not dialogue for dialogue’s sake. It is dialogue with an end in mind of bringing all involved in the dialogue to the fullness of truth that the Catholic Church
alone
possesses in fullness.

That is what authentic
dialogue
in the conciliar sense is all about.

INTRODUCTION

Protestant Premises and the Road to Rome

I had been a baptized Christian for only a few months, after growing up “unchurched” and then giving my life to Jesus during my senior year in college, when I began to grow uneasy about why we Christians were so divided from each other. The Southern Baptist beliefs I espoused were different, on matters both big and small, from those of other denominations, and we certainly didn’t worship with them. They had their church, and we had ours.

So began my period of inquiry about the lack of Christian unity and whether it was a problem. How had I, a newly minted Christian, come so quickly to a conclusion about which denomination taught the real truth?

I realized then that all I had learned about Christianity came from an Evangelical Protestant perspective. My friends had bought me a large, well-annotated New International Version of the Bible; I read it from cover to cover and then read it again. When I didn’t understand something, which was often, I would look down to see if there was an explanatory note about it, and I usually found one—given through an Evangelical Protestant filter. When I had questions about Christianity, I would ask my Evangelical friends, and they would answer me according to what they believed was true. Meanwhile I prayed that Jesus would guide me into the denomination that was truest. Having discovered him, I wanted to be as close to him as possible.

I assumed that the Bible had to be the sure basis for truth, because I believed it was the inerrant word of God. That sounded pretty good, but two problems occurred to me: First, other Protestant denominations claimed the same thing, and yet we were divided from them in our beliefs; and secondly, the Catholic Church claimed there were seven more books, not included in our Bible, that were also inspired by God.

The first problem, it seemed to me, forced us to conclude that it was possible for different Christians—all claiming to be “led by the Holy Spirit” and all basing their beliefs on “the Bible alone”—to veer off in different, mutually exclusive directions. Throughout history, I discovered, some person or group within a Protestant church came to believe differently than the others and broke off to form his own, new denomination. Since the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth and would never lead people to believe something untrue, at least some of the Christians who thought they were listening accurately to the Spirit’s promptings, in reality were not.

The second problem was of a different sort, because it struck at the root of my faith: We believed in the “Bible alone,” which meant we had to know with confidence which books made up the Bible. Yet here we had the Catholic Church claiming that my Bible was missing seven books that God had inspired and therefore desired to be included. How did I know who was right?

I finally concluded that one of two things must be true: Either the Holy Spirit had
tried
to guide Christians to know which books belonged in the Bible and we still got some of the books wrong; or the Holy Spirit succeeded, making sure the Bible was made up of the exact books that God himself inspired.

In other words, God either preserved his Church throughout history from errors that would corrupt its teachings, or he did not, in which case we could only be
somewhat
confident that
most
of our beliefs were
hopefully
true.

Hoping that the former was true, I wondered: Which denominations had the boldness to claim that they were that Church that held the fullness of the truth? (My Baptist church certainly didn’t claim that.) It turned out that Catholics, Orthodox, and Mormons did. Of these, only Catholics and Orthodox had credible historical and theological claims—but both were a long way from my Evangelical Protestantism.

I was dumbfounded and unsettled. The Catholic Church taught things about Mary, purgatory, the saints, the sacraments, and priests that I thought were completely bogus. But I tried to set this bias aside and be objective. With a sense of dread, I began investigating the Catholic Church in earnest, looking and hoping for something that would let me off the hook to return to Protestantism in peace.

Alas, I failed to find it.

I challenged my Evangelical friends to prove my arguments wrong and explain where I was going off course. They tried to do so, but could not explain, for example, why I should accept the Protestant canon of Scripture—or
any
canon, for that matter. I studied books, took part in Internet discussions, and read stories of faithful and intelligent Protestants converting to the Catholic Faith. Finally I was received into the Catholic Church at Easter, 2001. Two of my Evangelical friends came to the four-hour-long vigil Mass. (I greatly respect and love all my Protestant friends; I would not be the new man that I am today without them.)

My road to Rome began with taking the risk that God might be real, with the discovery that he loved me and was worth trusting. As I trusted him, I felt confident enough to question myself—including my Protestant perspective.

It was never a question in my mind that God is a reasonable being. I assumed it to be true, because even as an atheist I observed that the world functioned in a logical manner: Scientific laws were provable, mathematics could produce correct answers to problems, and deductive and inductive reasoning were demonstrably useful for understanding reality. The Christian faith, therefore, must also be supported by sound reasons, even if its truths also exceeded the limits of what reason could prove.

I brought such an analysis with me into my newfound faith, and I discovered that Protestantism’s tenets led to untenable conclusions. It simply was not possible to maintain a reasonable basis for my Christian faith while remaining Protestant. At least one
ad hoc
leap was required—accepting a given set of books as inspired Scripture—but once I chose to endorse such a leap, I had no basis to criticize someone who made a different leap (say, for instance, that the Book of Mormon or the Koran was also inspired by God).