The Protestant's Dilemma (2 page)

Twelve years later, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on these and other Protestant premises and how they result in logical absurdities. (It’s not that Protestants are absurd—far from it—but at the foundation of their beliefs is a hole that, for most, remains unexamined.) As time passed, I collected these premises, and the absurdities they led to, and put them together into this book.

Each section begins with a hypothetical statement, that if some premise of Protestantism were true, something else should logically follow. I then provide evidence that supports my claim that Protestantism does indeed accept the premise, and that the resulting logical conclusion is inevitable. Because Catholicism is true, the conclusion forced by the Protestant premise is absurd, and in each section I explain why that is so, giving the evidence (historical, theological, and rational) that supports the Catholic position. I conclude each section with a brief recap of the absurdity that Protestantism forces one to accept.

My ultimate goal, of course, is to demonstrate that the Catholic Faith is more plausible than Protestantism; that the Catholic Church is what it claims to be. In so doing I hope to clear away obstacles to believing in everything that Christ’s Church teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God.

But what do I mean by
Protestantism
? Many Christians object to being classified as Protestants, because the term signifies a protest or
rejection
of something—namely the Catholic Church—rather than something positive. I understand this; however, we are often stuck with the semantics that history has produced, and Protestantism is the broad name given to the movements (and their descendants) that broke from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century.

Therefore in this book I have chosen to use the term as it has been historically used, which means that Anglicans, Anabaptists, Lutherans, Calvinists, Evangelicals, and non-denominationals are all Protestant. They are not Catholic, or Orthodox, or Coptic. They all trace their origin to the 1500s and they all believe in the core principles of the Reformation:
sola scriptura
and
sola fide
, the sixty-six book canon of Scripture, the rejection of apostolic succession, and so on. Even though there are many differences among Protestants, and even though some point in this book will more closely apply to, say, Calvinists over Methodists or Pentecostals, these common beliefs enable us to speak and to reason about Protestantism as a whole.

____

Arguments alone cannot a Catholic make; faith is required, and God is ready to give it. But the assent of faith is usually not a blind jump that hopes to land on solid ground by happenstance. Rather, it is supported by motives of credibility.

I can only plod along with you to help you reach that point of decision. From there, it is up to you to accept the wings the Holy Spirit gives you so that you can launch and fly. So put on your thinking cap, say a prayer, and join me in this exploration of our Christian faith: the history, the people, the theology. Let’s see what we discover!

PART 1: THE CHURCH OF CHRIST

1: DIVINE AUTHORITY

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Christ revoked the authority that he gave to the Church when he founded it.

We know that Christ established a Church, visible and unified, to which he gave his divine authority. In Matthew’s Gospel we read that “he called to him his twelve apostles and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity” (Matt. 10:1). But according to Protestantism, this authority must have been lost when that visible Church became morally and doctrinally corrupt.

The Fall of the Church

The vast majority of Protestants believe that the visible Church did in fact lose God’s authority at some point in time; that Christ revoked it when corruption entered into its teachings. Many fundamentalist Protestants believe that the date when the Church became corrupted and lost God’s divine authorization was the year 313, when Constantine proclaimed the Edict of Milan, which ended the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire and began (they say) the mixture of pagan corruption with the true gospel.

But Protestants in general are usually not so exact in their dating estimates, and instead claim that corruption entered into the Church somewhere between the second and sixth centuries. The dates vary according to when a particular Protestant, in studying the historical evidence, discovers a doctrine or practice of the Church that he believes is heretical. John Calvin describes the pervasive nature of the Church’s corruption:

The light of divine truth had been extinguished, the word of God buried, the virtue of Christ left in profound oblivion, and the pastoral office subverted. Meanwhile, impiety so stalked abroad, that almost no doctrine of religion was pure from admixture, no ceremony free from error, no part, however minute, of divine worship untarnished by superstition.
¹

The notion that “the Church” became corrupt nonetheless does not sit well with Protestants, since they also believe the Bible passages that speak in exalted terms about the Church. Their solution is to separate the historical institution originally known as “the Church”—which fell into corruption—from the true Church of Christ, which continued undefiled. At the time of its corruption, whenever that was, the visible institution became the Roman Catholic Church, while Christ’s true Church became invisible and purely spiritual. Hence, the promises Christ made in the Bible still apply to all “true believers” in the world, who make up this invisible Church: the one that quietly endured through all the apostate centuries until the Reformation unearthed it.

No matter the particular date given for the corruption, it is common Protestant wisdom that by the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church had devolved into such a disaster of human traditions and theological errors that the only solution was a clean break: to make clear the difference between the true Church of the Bible and the corrupted impostor.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

The Church has never lost the divine authority that Christ gave it, and corruption has never polluted its teachings.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says to his disciples: “Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me” (10:16). Notice the direct line of authority: The Father sends the Son, and the Son sends the apostles with his authority, such that listening to them (and the men whom they in turn authorize) is equivalent to listening to Jesus and the Father. We see how closely Christ associates himself with his Church when he knocks Saul (who later becomes Paul) off his horse:

Now Saul, still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, that, if he should find any men or women who belonged to the Way, he might bring them back to Jerusalem in chains. On his journey, as he was nearing Damascus, a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” He said, “Who are you, sir?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:1–5).

Notice that Jesus didn’t say, “Saul, why are you persecuting
my followers,
” but rather, “Why are you persecuting
me
?” For in murdering the leaders of Christ’s Church, Saul was rejecting not only them but Christ himself.

From history, we see the apostles and then their successors, the bishops, exercising this authority in the Church, and the Church thriving under their divinely authorized leadership—even in the midst of horrific persecutions. From the Bible and early Christian writings, we understand that the authority Christ gave to the apostles as the leaders of his Church was transmitted to their successors. Paul speaks of this authority in his first letter to his disciple, Timothy: “[D]o not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you through prophecy with the laying on of hands by the council of elders” (1 Tim. 4:14). In the next chapter, he enjoins Timothy to “not be hasty in the laying on of hands” to avoid ordaining an unworthy man to lead the church (1 Tim. 5:22). Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, in the late first and early second centuries, testify to the authority given bishops as successors to the apostles.

Likewise, in order to make sense, the promises that Christ made to the Church must be understood as permanent; nowhere does Jesus say that at some point he would abandon his Church to let the gates of hell prevail against it (indeed he says the opposite) or that the authority he had given its leaders would be revoked.

The claim that the Emperor Constantine founded the (corrupted, visible) Catholic Church is an old myth with no evidence to recommend it. The Edict of Milan did not make Christianity the state religion of the empire; it merely provided for official toleration of Christianity within Roman borders, so that Christians could worship God without being persecuted for it. It’s true that Constantine ceremonially opened the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325, but he did so as a temporal leader concerned with political stability, since the Arian heretics had caused such conflict in his realm. In any event, the council he summoned confirmed Christ’s true divinity and produced the first part of the Nicene Creed (both of which Protestants accept)—hardly something a corrupt and heretical Church would do.

Since most Protestants do not give a specific event and date for how and when corruption entered the Church but instead mention a vague span of centuries, it is best to consider the plausibility of the assertion in general. Interestingly, it differs from the theology of the Mormons (Latter-Day Saints) only in the date given, for Mormons believe that the Church lost the authority Christ gave it sometime around A.D. 70 or 100 (either at the death of Peter or of the last apostle). At that time, they assert, the “Great Apostasy” began, which lasted for around 1,700 years before Christ reestablished his authority in the Mormon Church through Joseph Smith.

Does the Mormon claim seem plausible? The Word became flesh, pouring his life and wisdom into his disciples, inaugurating the era of the Church, the New People of God. Then, Christ gave us the Holy Spirit, the spirit “of power, of love, and of self-control” (2 Tim. 1:7), whom he promised would lead the apostles (and thus the Church) into all truth (see John 16:13). But the Mormon assertion means that the Holy Spirit utterly failed to lead the Church into all truth. Indeed, as soon as the last apostle died, the Church went belly-up for longer than 1,700 years! The gates of hell indeed prevailed against the Church, necessitating its reestablishment through a new revelation. Christ failed to keep his Church together and protected from adulterated teachings for even
one generation
beyond his life on Earth.

This key claim of Mormonism is not credible, even to most Protestants, yet the Protestant corollary is substantially similar, differing only in the number of years it took for corruption to taint the Church and its teachings and in the manner of the “true” Church’s re-constitution.

Even as a Baptist, I rejected the Mormon claim of the Church losing its authority at the death of the apostles, but as I pondered this question, I had to admit that my Protestant beliefs were not so very different. When did I, as a Baptist, think that corruption had entered into the Church’s teachings? The truth was that I had never given it much thought. “It happened in the first four or five centuries perhaps,” I mused vaguely. And, like most Protestants, I thought that the Reformers had more or less corrected the corrupted teachings and set things right again. What did I think had happened to the Church for the thousand years between the corruption and the Reformation? To be honest, I didn’t really think about it—nor do most Protestants.

Since Christ established a visible Church in the first century and gave it rightful authority, the burden of proof falls on Protestants to demonstrate that he revoked this authority universally from the Church at some point in time. What event can they point to that caused Christ to take away his authority, and which Church leaders were involved in it? Where is the historical evidence for the claim? I have asked this question to many knowledgeable Protestant apologists and pastors and have yet to receive a definite answer. The fact is, no event or even century can be pinpointed that can carry the weight of such a momentous claim, so the fallback is the idea that false teachings crept slowly into the Church and eventually tainted the gospel beyond recognition.

There is another problem with the Protestant version of events. Realizing the problematic nature of asserting that Christ’s Church became corrupted, most Protestants will fall back to the claim that the
true
Church remained pure but was simply invisible. We know from history, however, that Christ founded a visible Church, and the members of his Church were unified together as his mystical Body, of which he is the head.
²
A body is both visible and alive; if you found a severed hand, a foot, an arm, and a toe on the ground, you would not say, “Here is a body,” but rather, “Here are parts that were severed from a body.”