The Protestant's Dilemma: How the Reformation's Shocking Consequences Point to the Truth of Catholicism

by Devin Rose

few are willing to accept that Mary is the “mother of God,” as the third ecumenical council in Ephesus declared.

Even Martin Luther, who had no problem with this title,

The Catholic Church is the only Christian Church or community that still holds ecumenical councils today. No other group dares to claim that it has held one, which makes sense when you realize that no other group is led by the bishop of Rome.

Protestants claim they unquestioningly accept the authority of the first four ecumenical councils, which declared the foundational truths of Christianity. Yet they reject certain decrees even of those councils and accept certain decrees from later councils while rejecting others. And they do not

have a rule for determining why the first four are ecumenical but later ones are not. Assuming the Catholic Church is wrong about what makes a council ecumenical, why did God design his Church such that, for centuries, these councils were the primary way in which vitally important matters of the Faith were discerned and authoritatively proclaimed, but then remove his authority from them such that they could no longer be trustworthy?

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called . . . forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all.17

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any

such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.18 Notice that Paul nowhere claims that God only declares the Church to be holy, but rather that Christ really cleanses it, sanctifies it, and presents it without blemish to himself. In Catholic theology, following the biblical pattern, Christ has married his Church, and so he truly purifies it. Christ did not give himself up for the Church just so God could declare a legal fiction that it is pure. Instead, his sacrifice of love is powerful enough to truly cleanse it in truth.

The word “catholic” means “universal,” in the sense of “according to the totality” or “in keeping with the whole.” The Church is catholic in a double sense: first, the Church is catholic because Christ is present in her. “Where there is Christ Jesus, there is the Catholic Church.” In her subsists the fullness of Christ’s body united with its head; this implies that she receives from him “the fullness of the means of salvation” which he has willed: correct and complete confession of faith, full sacramental life, and ordained ministry in

apostolic succession. The Church was, in this fundamental sense, catholic on the day of Pentecost and will always be so until the day of the Parousia.19

“So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone” (Eph. 2:19–20).

To have a church built upon an apostolic foundation means not merely to be in (presumed) doctrinal agreement or moral unity with the apostles—it

means to be sharers in the apostles’ authority. God transmitted that authority from the apostles to their successors, the bishops, through the laying on of hands—and then in turn to their successors (cf. 1 Tim. 4:14). Through this apostolic succe...

The Protestant idea of apostolicity is a half-truth. It does mean unity of belief with apostolic teaching; however, the way that we know what the apostles taught is not to

exercise our personal judgment but to look to their successors, to whom apostolic faith and authority have been given.

even though the Church is made up of sinful human beings, the Holy Spirit could make it not just infallible but also holy.

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.

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.

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.

As for the Jews, although it’s true that they did not have an infallible magisterium and that their canon grew over time as God sent more prophets to them, it’s also true that the New Covenant is greater than the Old in every way. The Israelites ate manna in the desert, but the new people of God feed on Christ himself in the Eucharist. The Jews were given the Law to help them know and follow God’s will, but

members of the Church are given God’s Spirit to help them live in the freedom of Christ. In like manner, God went beyond the Old Covenant when it came to the canon of Scripture, guiding his Church in the New Covenant to discern which books he had inspired and which he had not.

If Protestantism is true, then the basis for all of our Christian beliefs, the Bible, may well contain books that God did not inspire, or it may leave out books that he did. At best we can be somewhat sure that many of the books of the Bible are probably inspired. According to the influential Protestant voice of Sproul, the canon was not infallibly

selected. Therefore it may contain error. That’s an unsettling thought, because if Protestantism is true, the Bible is all we’ve got.

Protestants hold the doctrine of sola scriptura: The Bible alone is the authoritative source of Christian truth. A corollary of this doctrine is the belief that the Bible’s teachings are clear—at least to true Christians, whom God guides in their reading of Scripture. In theory, then, all Protestant groups that subscribe to sola scriptura ought to be united in belief, since they’re all

drawing their teachings from the one clear Scripture and are guided into truth by the same Holy Spirit. Yet Protestant churches disagree with one another on many doctrines.

Doctrinal disagreements erupted in every place Protestantism took hold: Luther’s compatriot Melanchthon drifted from his more literal eucharistic beliefs; Zwingli’s colleagues didn’t think he went far enough fast enough in his changes to the Mass; the radical Reformers (Anabaptists) contradicted all the magisterial Reformers on infant baptism; Calvin contradicted Luther on church governance; and

Anglicans incorporated a hodge-podge of the continental Reformers’ ideas into their own unique blend of Catholic-Protestant teachings, resulting in a theology abhorrent to the Puritans.

The bigger problem was that even evangelical Protestants didn’t agree with one another . . . about many important doctrines: our view of the inspiration of Scripture; how we define faith, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper; church order; the doctrine of the future; the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the doctrine of the human will; and the nature of how God’s grace works in salvation. The more I studied these internal evangelical debates, the longer the list grew. Something was wrong . . . but I still couldn’t see exactly what it was.43

The problem is with the way Protestants go about trying to know

divine truth. God didn’t give us the Bible alone to be subjectively interpreted by every individual Christian based on his own education, reading comprehension, interests, personality, and transitory moods. Such a scheme would make each Christian his own sole authority, rather than the Church Christ founded and guided. But sadly—and unintentionally—that is where Protestantism’s principles leave us.

If Protestantism is true, then difficult parts of Scripture should be understandable through careful study, prayerful consideration, and application of other parts of Scripture that are ostensibly clearer. Yet

when faithful members of Protestant communities study hard, prayerfully seek God’s illumination, and diligently apply other parts of Scripture, they still arrive at different interpretations—often leading to the founding of a new community or denomination. For a Protestant, sola scriptura makes him, and not the Bible, the final authority.

Imagine many arrows being shot at a target. Though the archers may not have perfect aim, the Spirit corrects their shots in mid-flight and they mostly cluster around the target. We’re resigned to personal

interpretation, and that interpretation will be fallible, but God makes sure that together we get the big questions right in the end.

God wanted all Christians to know saving truth, so he has infallibly guided the Church in its teachings on faith and morals.

Keith Mathison’s belief that we should look to the Church for how to interpret Scripture is correct, but he fails to correctly identify which Church that is. He wants the magisterium, but Protestantism doesn’t offer it.

Catholicism does. Christ founded

the Church, established the apostles as its rightful leaders,48 and promised to send his Spirit to...

Even in the first century we see the apostles acting with authority, interpreting Scripture and binding the faithful to their decisions.50 Only if they had been established by divine authority would they have the right to do this; the New Testament records that they did have that right.51 This same magisterium is found today in the Catholic Church, having continually exercised the authority Christ gave it. Since the Church is fully protected from error by th...

If Protestantism is true, then no infallible interpreter of Scripture exists and thus no interpretation can be accepted as authoritative. At best we’re forced to have faith that through some mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, all of our collective fallibility somehow leads us to the correct interpretation of Bible truths.

The history of the Catholic Church, even prior to the Reformation, demonstrates consistent commitment to spreading the gospel of Christ to the ends of the earth.

The Catholic Church, however—transcending nations, political philosophies, and time—has always known that the duty to evangelize belongs to the Church and to each of its members.

Vatican Council explains:

For this reason Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making himself present and manifesting himself: through His words and deeds, His signs and wonders, but especially through His death and glorious resurrection from the dead and final sending of the Spirit of truth. Moreover He confirmed with divine testimony what revelation proclaimed, that God is with us to free us from the darkness of sin and death, and to raise us up to life eternal. The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (see 1 Tim. 6:14 and Tit. 2:13).60

If Protestantism is true, there is no reason to say for sure that revelation is closed (since nowhere does Scripture say it is). And so the possibility remains that there may be future public revelation—like the Book of Mormon—leading to confusion and chaos among God’s people.

Even though Evangelicals owe many of their most important beliefs to John Calvin’s influence, through the revival spirit of anti-traditionalism many denied any connection with him and did not even have a basic understanding of who he was. Fast-forward to today, and the situation is much the same.

A dose of humility is the remedy. Just as we do not attempt to re-derive all mathematical and scientific formulas anew in every generation, so we should stand on the shoulders of the saintly theological giants who have gone before us. If nothing else, it stands to reason that the men and women closest in time and proximity to the apostles could give us invaluable insights into their teachings. And, indeed, this is what we see when we read their works.63

This is exactly the pattern followed in the Old Covenant, in which the Israelites revered and learned from the great men and women of God who had gone before

them—so much so that these heroes were eulogized in the New Testament in chapter 11 of the book of Hebrews. The inspired author instructs us to learn from the examples of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, David, and the holy woman in 2 Maccabees 7. How much more so, then, should we learn from the great Christian saints of the past 2,000 years? Rather than reinvent the wheel (and inevitably design a worse one), we sh...