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

by Devin Rose

seems obvious that the Bible cannot be taken in every verse literalistically: Otherwise we’d all

breaking Christ’s express command every time we throw a party with friends! A given book or passage may contain poetry, parable, apocalyptic imagery, or hyperbole, each necessitating its own interpretive principles. But the Bible itself doesn’t tell us when to use which principle in a given instance; neither do all scholars or theologians agree on it. A Protestant, bound by sola scriptura, cannot appeal to a magisterium, or Sacred Tradition, or even sound principles of biblical scholarship, for all these things are extra-scriptural. When encountering difficult and even seemingly absurd scriptural data, he can only make his own interior judgment about what to accept as literal and

what to interpret o...

This is not a problem for the Catholic because his Church is protected from error by the Holy Spir...

Church to guide him...

If Protestantism is true, then we must obey the Bible alone, even when its commands seem impractical, even absurd, for we reject any authoritative interpreter outside of Scripture itself. Yet in practice Protestants don’t do this. Instead they fill in the interpretive vacuum by silently accepting various principles and ideas that form a lens through which they read the word of God.

The Catholic Church teaches a doctrine called the communion of saints, which the Catholic Encyclopedia calls the spiritual solidarity which binds together the faithful on earth, the souls in purgatory, and the saints

in heaven in the organic unity of the same mystical body under Christ its head. . . . The participants in that solidarity are called saints by reason of their destination [heaven] and of their partaking of the fruits of the Redemption.

The communion of saints is a spiritual family, and death cannot sunder it, because we are joined to Christ who has conquered death. So we ask our brethren here on Earth to pray for us, knowing they are in Christ, and we do the same for those who have fallen asleep in him. God is a loving Father who, like earthly fathers, delights when his children are rightly praised for the good they do in their attempts to follow his commandments. Regarding veneration of the

saints and relics, it should first be made clear that it is sinful for anyone to worship someone or something other than God. The Catholic Church teaches that, and if some Catholics don’t know it, they need to be told. So worshiping a saint is wrong, and worshiping a statue of the saint—heaven forbid—is wrong.67 Do we steal glory from God when we honor one of his children? On the contrary, by recognizing that the good deeds and holy lives of the saints were products of God’s grace, and by seeking to emulate them, we give due honor to God.68

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:3–5).

Peter 3:20–21:

[W]hen the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the

water. And corresponding to that, baptism now saves you not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience th...

Just as God saved Noah and his family through the ark, Christ gives us new life through baptism, which cleanses us from sin and thus gives us a “good conscience.” On the day of Pentecost, Peter exhorts the people to receive baptism: “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgi...

Get up and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16).

His reasoning is compelling: If infant baptism is invalid, then the vast majority of Christians (who were baptized as infants) were invalidly baptized, and thus never received the Holy Spirit or the virtues of faith, hope, and love. They were therefore not members of Christ’s Church and thus could not even be rightfully called Christians. On the other hand, if infant baptism is valid, then the

Protestant groups practicing credo-baptism were denying children the supernatural help they needed to be saved.

The Catholic Church teaches that “sacraments are outward signs of inward grace, instituted by Christ for our sanctification.”

(note Christ’s priorities toward the seriously ill in Matthew 9:2–7).

Mark 6:13,

In John 6, the Bread of Life discourse, Jesus explains that he is the living bread that came down from heaven, bread that a man can eat and live forever. Up until verse 51, a purely figurative interpretation of his words seems possible. “Believing in Jesus” is the work he wants us to do,101 so eating his flesh must

simply be another way of saying, albeit in a strange way, that we have to believe in him. But from verse 53 to 54 and onward, in answer to the confusion expressed by the Jews at his words, Jesus does something very odd (if Protestantism is true, and the Eucharist is figurative): He makes the eating of his flesh even more graphic by using a different word102 for eating, rendered as the Greek trogo, denoting an animal-like gnawing. In the subsequent verses, he doubles down on this more primal way of eating by continuing to use trogo: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.103 Jesus must have known that his listeners would rebel at these words, given God’s injunction in the Old Covenant against consuming blood.104 And his follower...

who remained, and asked if they, too, would abandon him over this teaching. If he had been using a mere figure of speech, he would have consoled his disciples by telling them so. It would have made no sense to drive them away by leading them to believe something that he did not mean.105 And so the ancient Church’s teaching on the Real P...

It must be noted that this is God’s ordinary means of bestowing the grace of forgiveness. A Protestant who wholeheartedly and humbly confesses his sins as he has been taught to confess (which varies greatly within Protestantism) doesn’t necessarily miss out on forgiveness. God is never bound by his own designs. At the very least, though, the Protestant does miss out on the peace that Catholics enjoy as they leave the confessional with the freedom of knowing that they have been forgiven.

Catholics can agree that the temple veil’s being torn in two does demonstrate that, through Christ, we now have direct access to God. In no way can this be construed to mean, however, that God then quit using men as instruments of salvation. If anything, Christ’s Incarnation suggests the opposite. God chose to save us through a man, the God-Man, providing us a supreme example of human cooperation with divine grace.

Luther knew that he had to

reject apostolic succession; otherwise he could not justify causing a schism from the Church and establishing another church based on his own authority. At the same time he needed plausible justification for that authority. So he and the other Reformers posited a new idea: that authority is given by God to whoever teaches the true gospel—a doctrine sometimes called apostolicity.108 This broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly on apostolic authority and opened up that authority to Luther, Calvin, the Anabaptists—to anyone, really, who thought that he was teaching the truth from the Bible.

Clement, the close successor to Peter himself, wrote within the first century: The apostles have preached the gospel to us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ [has done so] from God. Christ therefore was sent forth by God, and the apostles by Christ. Both these appointments, then, were made in an orderly way, according to the will of God. . . . And thus preaching through countries and cities, they appointed the first fruits [of their labors], having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe. Nor was this any new thing, since indeed many ages before it was written concerning bishops and deacons. For thus says the Scripture in a certain place, “I will appoint their bishops in righteousness, and their deacons in faith.” Our apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be strife on account of the office of the episcopate. For this reason, therefore, inasmuch as they had obtained a perfect foreknowledge of this, they appointed those [ministers] already mentioned, and afterwards gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry.110

But since Protestants do not have valid succession from the apostles, they must reject holy orders as the sacrament by which divine authority is transmitted to men, by Christ, through other ordained men.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger,

This is precisely what we mean when we call ordination of priests a sacrament: ordination is not about the development of one’s own powers and gifts. It is not the appointment of a man as a functionary because he is especially good at it, or because it suits him . . . it is not a question of a job in which someone secures his own livelihood by his own abilities, perhaps in order to rise later

to something better. Sacrament means: I give what I myself cannot give; I do something that is not my work; I am on a mission and have become the bearer of that which another has committed to my charge. Consequently, it is also impossible for anyone to declare himself a priest or for a community to make someone a priest by its own fiat. One can receive what is God’s only from the sacrament, by entering into the mission that makes me the messenger and instrument of another.

Protestant communities view their ministers, who are “ordained” by the fiat of the community and not through a sacrament, as functionaries rather than as persons specially configured to Christ through holy orders. This flawed conception represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that God instituted rightful authority in his Church.

In 2009, the members of the ELCA voted to endorse clergy who are in homosexual relationships, opening “the ministry of the church to gay and lesbian pastors and other professional workers living in committed relationships.”

The ELCA was following in the footsteps of the Episcopal Church, which had ordained an open homosexual as bishop in 2003, and which adopted a resolution in 2009 to allow individual bishops to decide whether to bless same-sex unions, and would three years later designate an official liturgy for such blessings. With civil law throughout the Western world rapidly redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, many other Protestant groups have followed suit or are in a period of evolution.113

This evolution logically follows from another historical change: Protestantism’s acceptance of contraception. Beginning with

the Anglican Communion in the early twentieth century,114 nearly all of Protestantism has come to embrace the idea that marriage is about sex and companionship first, procreation second. Once marriage and babies were so divorced, Protestants had no principled objection to unions of same-sex couples, who could argue ...

In a recent survey, an astounding 80 percent of Evangelicals ages 18 to 29 claimed to have

engaged in premarital sex, and a large majority were sexually active in the past year.115 This reality has prompted many Protestant leaders to take the incredible step of encouraging these unmarried Christians to use contraceptives when they have premarital sex.116

Examining the history of contraception and same-sex acts shows us that Christians universally rejected them as immoral. Contraception was condemned by all churches and ecclesial communities until 1930. No Christian church recognized the morality of homosexual relationships or the validity of same-sex “marriages” until recent years. Premarital sex is still officially taught to be immoral by most Protestant churches, but clearly the young people in those churches aren’t receiving the message.

These radical reversals in Protestantism’s beliefs on sexual morality stem from a rejection of the natural law and their embrace of nominalism: They reject the idea that humans can recognize the nature of things, that the body has inherent meaning because it reflects the person.119 Even Protestant pastors fall to this error, because, following Protestantism’s bedrock principle of sola scriptura and individual interpretive authority, they choose to believe that only those practices that a Christian interprets to be explicitly condemned by the Bible are off limits. Everything else is fair game if both parties consent to it.

Because they hold to sola scriptura, Protestants can look only to the Bible itself for binding arguments for or...

Catholics, on the other hand, draw from Scripture and the Apostolic Tradition, building upon the natural law, to know truth in its fullness. The natural law can get

us as far as heterosexual marriage, and Scripture and Tradition, as interpreted authoritatively by the Church’s magisterium, can reveal to us the full beauty and splendor of God’s design. The husband and wife make a total gift of themselves to each other, becoming a communion of life and love that images the communion between the divine persons of the Holy Trinity. Within the total, lifelong commitment of marriage, children find the ideal environment to learn to love.

Let’s analyze why certain sexual acts are immoral. Though at first glance they may seem unrelated, same-sex acts and contracepted sex both disconnect sexual pleasure from openness to life, to procreation. The sexual act should be one of mutual love that unit...

Finally, this [married] love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare.” 120 This fecundity is what makes the marital act self-giving. Homosexual acts and contraception are intrinsically selfish and closed in on themselves, for they can never be life-giving...

If Protestantism is true, then traditional Christian standards of sexual morality have either been wrong for two millennia or they can change with the times. If they’ve been wrong, what other teachings could be wrong? And if they can change, what else can change?

Protestant Reversal on Abortion and Divorce From the Reformation until the 1960s, all Protestant groups condemned abortion as evil, but as the winds of modern society began to shift, so did Protestant teachings. It began with the Episcopal Church in 1967, when its General Convention voted to approve abortions in certain situations.121 The dominoes continued to fall over the next five years, with the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) reversing its pro-life position to support unrestricted access to abortion, the Lutheran Church in America (a precursor to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) declaring it was the decision of the woman, and the United Methodists, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and even the Southern Baptist Convention following suit.122