St. Joseph’s Vanguard And Our Lady’s Train

Picture this: isolated tribe of “native peoples” who live in a never-before-discovered island. Plane flies overhead and a twenty-seven book New Testament is accidentally dropped on the island. Natives read it, put their faith in the Jesus it talks about, and strive to do what it teaches. What might happen?

The undiscovered island

1. Confusion erupts over a contradiction that was quickly found where “Paul of Romans” says that we are justified by faith apart from works but elsewhere says that the doers of the law will be justified. Further confusion arises when James chapter two is read that says we are justified by works and not by faith alone. Two groups split on the island over this issue.

2. The natives read about baptism and take a shot at it, but further division arises as one group says that people should be baptized “in the name of Jesus” ala Acts 2:38 while others claim that the entire Holy Trinity must be individually named ala Matthew 28. Another division splits both existing groups, leading to four groups.

3. More baptism problems arise over 1 Corinthians 15:29: “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?” Another split occurs in each of the groups as some claim that this passage means that living Christians should be baptized on behalf of the unbaptized dead so that they receive the gospel too. (Don’t think that this is something made up or crazy, either.) Now there are eight groups.

4. Jesus clearly commanded Christians to celebrate the Last Supper rite “do this in memory of me,” so the natives begin doing that, but a hermeneutical squabble ensues over whether Jesus literally, sacramentally, physically, meta-physically, symbolically, or really-but-not-really meant “this is my body.” Each group splits into five new groups to give forty groups.

5. The New Testament seems unclear on whether Jesus was one in being with the Father and the Spirit or not–splits result in eighty groups. Did Jesus have one divine nature or two natures human and divine or a one composite nature made up of two parts–splits result in 240 groups. Did Jesus have one divine will or two wills: one divine and one human? 480 groups.

6. By this time, one hundred years had passed, and there were 500 total groups (20 more formed as sub-splits for reasons such as whether bongo drums should be used in the service or not). A big crisis occurred over whether all twenty-seven book were really inspired by God or not. A set of charismatic leaders emerged from each of the 500 groups who came out strongly in favor of five books being non-inspired (James, Revelation, Hebrews, Jude, and 2 Peter). They carry their groups into schism but cannot agree with one another since each thinks all the others are “obviously wrong” on one or more of issues 1 – 5. Now there are 1,000 groups: half have 22 books in their Bible and the other have 27. (The first group accuses the second of “adding” books to the Bible while the second group accuses the first of “removing” books–sound familiar?)

At this point in time, a group of Catholic missionaries arrive at the island and are surprised to learn that the natives all claim to be Christians.

The Catholics ask about what the different groups’ beliefs are and quickly identify strains of different Protestant ideas along with Mormon, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Arian, Monophysite, and Monothelite doctrines. It seems that, from the same New Testament books, many of the erroneous teachings that had sprung up in Christendom over 2,000 years had developed on this island as well.

Now certainly this is a imaginary scenario, but when you consider the number of different Christian denominations who all claim to follow the Bible alone, yet contradict each other in teaching after teaching, you realize that this scenario is not that far-fetched.

Acts 8 seems appropriate:

Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, that is, the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury, who had come to Jerusalem to worship, and was returning home. Seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.

The Spirit said to Philip, “Go and join up with that chariot.” Philip ran up and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?”

He replied, “How can I, unless someone instructs me?” So he invited Philip to get in and sit with him.

And how can we correctly instruct others in the Scriptures unless we understand them within the living Tradition of Christ’s Church?

It seems to me that one of the worst things that could happen to you as a Christian, other than losing your soul, would be to have throngs of people following you who identify themselves with your name (Calvin-ist, Luther-an, Barth-ian, etc. Okay, I made up N.T. Wright-ian, but I won’t be surprised if it happens soon after he dies).

The passage in the Bible from 1 Corinthians 1 is pretty relevant:

For it has been reported to me about you, my brothers, by Chloe’s people, that there are rivalries among you. I mean that each of you is saying, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,”…Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

Were you baptized into John Calvin? Was Martin Luther crucified for you?

Karl Barth

Now of course, I know that Lutherans and Calvinists don’t intend to say that they follow Calvin instead of Christ, but rather they follow Christ as he is understood in a primary way through the teachings of Luther or Calvin, in order to differentiate themselves from Anabaptists, Methodists, Catholics, and so on.

But isn’t Paul’s whole point that there shouldn’t be such divisions (schisms) where one group follows this man and another group follows that man? Christ is not divided, and He prayed that we would not be. So it seems we can deduce that schisms are wrong and that Christ desires that we be “perfectly one” just as He and the Father are perfectly one.

So what are we doing about it? Some friends of mine have attempted to counter my efforts to work toward unity by declaring that “they see no problems in what they believe and are fine letting me believe whatever it is that I believe,” so why make such a fuss? Quite simply, because Christ desires it, as He made clear in the sacred Scriptures. If Christ (and Christ through St. Paul) said “yeah go ahead and break into schisms and follow this one or that one–it’s all good,” then I wouldn’t care about Christian unity. But instead, Christ and St. Paul say the exact opposite: Christians are called to full communion with the Church that Christ established.

I would also answer my friends that, if they do not see a problem with the divisions within Christianity, they should pray and ask our Lord to show them whether it is a problem or not. It is easy for us to get used to “the way things are” and develop blind spots in our moral and spiritual life (think of pornography, objectionable movies/music, foul language, and so on as blatant examples), and we need to be “convicted” by God that these are problems, to borrow language from my Baptist days.

John Calvin requested to be buried in an unmarked grave so that he would not be venerated and have “Calvinists” make pilgrimages to his tomb. It is somewhat ironic given his iconoclasm and aversion to veneration of the saints that he would fear that his followers would do exactly those things toward him, but there it is. Unfortunately, he was unable to prevent millions of Christians from naming themselves Calvinist Christians in his honor.

How is this avoided? After all, Christ works through human beings, and it is natural to want to follow someone who seems to preach Christ powerfully. I would say, it can only be avoided when a person bases their teaching, not on their own authority or biblical interpretation, but on the authority given to the Church that Christ established. Because, instead of them declaring themselves to be a minister and proclaiming their interpretation of the Bible, they are ordained by the successors of the Apostles, whom Christ Himself ordained. And they base their teachings off of those of the Church which Christ has protected from error.

John Calvin

It seems everytime I turn around and read an article on Christianity somewhere, N.T. Wright, the famed Anglican bishop and theologian, is popping up.

“Did you read what N.T. Wright said about that?”
“Oh, but have you read Wright’s newest book about Paul? He really explains what it’s all about there.”

Serendipitously, just as I began to write this post, I saw a new article on the Internet Monk’s site come up in my reader: “N.T. Wright on the Hunger for Worship”.

So why am I talking about Wright when this post’s title is asking what it must have been like for Calvin or Luther? Because in the fame and respect given to Wright, we see a glimmer of the fame and deference that were given to Luther and Calvin.

In the 16th century, I can imagine all the newly-minted Protestants in Geneva and Europe saying “but what does Jean Cauvin [John Calvin] think about that doctrine?” Regarding Luther, I remember watching A Man for All Seasons when St. Thomas More’s future son-in-law, Will Roper, let’s More know what “Dr. Luther” thinks about the Catholic Church.

Fortunately for us, we live in more Enlightened times and, for example, going against N.T. Wright’s opinion about such-and-such teaching while living in Durham, England, won’t get you beaten down like going against Calvin in Geneva would have. Still, Wright’s influence is incredible. He represents in some ways everything for the thinking Protestant: he’s an Anglican bishop so he’s “high church” in a sense, yet he is “Evangelical” in his approach to the Christian faith.

As my friend (and Wright-o-phile) Phil says: “He’s a one man magisterium!”
Or an “army of one,” as another friend, and recent convert to the Catholic Faith, Tom Brown wrote about a while back.

But the question is: why should we listen to Wright? What authority does he have, and what of this “new perspective on Paul” that he has come up with? What makes it more than just a mere opinion of one man (albeit an intelligent one)?

Do we have a living authority in Christ’s Church that we can follow and know that God is guiding, or do we have only an Academic Magisterium of scholars and theologians (like Luther, Calvin, and Wright)?

Can we know divine revelation with assurance today? St. Paul wanted the Colossians to know it back in the 1st century:

…to have all the riches of assured understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, of Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

I say this in order that no one may delude you with beguiling speech.

So they can know it because the Apostles taught it to them and Jesus taught the Apostles. But it’s been a long time since those days. Can divine revelation be handed down through one person to the next without corruption, or is it instead like a epic game of Telephone where one person whispers a message in the next one’s ear, and he whispers into another’s, and so on for centuries, with small errors creeping in over time to render the final message today a garbled mess?

Icon of St. Paul

And how are we supposed to know who the persons are who will teach us the Faith in truth versus those persons who will try to “delude us with beguiling speech”? How can we tell the difference when innumerable men claim to be Christian teachers but contradict each other on doctrine after doctrine?

The Protestant answer to these questions are: 1) Divine revelation was preserved in the [sixty-six book] Bible and we know through redactive analysis that the copies of the copies of the copies of the originals that we possess are substantially similar to the originals, and 2) You will know those who try to delude you by testing what they say against [your interpretation of] the Scriptures.

The first answer is plausible I think. The idea is that anything oral will be corrupted quickly. Coupled with the Protestant rejection that there is a living, sacred Tradition of the Church that the Spirit guides and which connects us with Christ and therefore is trustworthy, the only thing we can hope was preserved–like Noah and the Ark–from the flood of the “Dark Ages” of history, are sixty-six particular books considered by Protestants to be inspired. The best we can do is read those books, try to figure out what they mean through study and prayer, and live with the thousands of different denominations that have sprung up as a result, either waving away the differences via lowest-common denominator Christianity or repudiating denominations which disagree with your own as “not listening to the Spirit.”

The second answer is less plausible. All Protestants say that one must “test everything” with the Holy Spirit and the Bible to avoid being deluded by false teachers, but in practice this means testing everything against their own interpretation of the Scriptures. And who is to say that their interpretation is correct? Thousands of denominations demonstrate that everyone thinks that their interpretation is correct, but obviously they cannot all be so.

Ultimately, Protestantism must admit that the propositions of the Faith are merely opinions and therefore subject to faith-challenged people like the Jesus Seminar coming up with radically different visions of who Jesus was, as well as faithful men like N.T. Wright overturning the tables on one of the few bastions of widely-accepted Protestant theology: justification.

The Catholic Church answers these questions by affirming that God has made it possible to know, with assured understanding, divine revelation in its fullness as revealed by Christ and in the ways that the Spirit has deepened the Church’s understanding of it over time. He has protected the deposit of Faith from corruption and from the attacks of “beguiling teachers” in every century, for He desires that we know the truth and be able to then live in the truth.

He didn’t just leave us some books, old tomes for us to puzzle over two thousand years later and try to figure out. He didn’t abandon His children during the “Dark Ages,” but in every century He has been with His people in the liturgy, in the sacraments, and in their hearts by His Spirit. The Catholic Church affirms that God’s promise to the Church has been unbroken. The deposit of the Faith are not opinions that a person–even a smart and faith-filled person like N.T. Wright–can come along and overturn. They are rather propositions that Christ gives us through His Church which we can confidently and reasonably assent to.

Finally, we can know His Church from those “beguilers” because it’s a big and ancient institution that everyone is familiar with and many utterly despise. It’s one of only two institutions that have the audacity and the credibility to claim to be the Church Christ established. (The other being the Orthodox.)

I had another lunch discussion with my Reformed Protestant friend (and another Protestant friend joined us as well) to continue going through Romans. We read the first half of Romans 4 today, where Abraham’s faith is reckoned to him as righteous.

Westminster Abbey

I was waiting for the big “See!” from my friend, where he would point to those verses and then declare that justification was obviously accomplished by the imputed righteousness of Christ. But he never did that, even though that’s what Reformed Protestantism teaches.

So, since I knew that Catholic teaching is that Christ infuses His righteousness into us (such that we are truly made righteous) and the Protestant teaching that God imputes Christ’s righteousness to our account (so that we are declared righteous because God only “sees” Christ’s righteousness when He looks at us), I asked them which way they thought we were justified.

“Both ways,” they (surprisingly) replied.
“Are you sure about that,” I asked.
“Yeah, Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us and He infuses His righteousness into us, and those together are the way we are justified.”

I mentioned that I didn’t think that that’s what the standard Reformed Protestant confessions teach, so after lunch I looked it up in the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), which says:

Those whom God effectually calleth, He also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them…but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on Him and His righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.

It seems pretty clear from the WCF that Reformed Protestantism believes in justification by imputed righteousness and not infused. It even specifically denies infusion of Christ’s righteousness into the person.

The lesson is this: your Protestant friend’s denomination may teach a particular thing in their confession/creed/”what we believe” statement, but your friend may either 1) not know what the teaching actually is or 2) know it and disagree with it. This can make discussion a bit harder as, if I didn’t already know the Reformed Protestant doctrine, we would have come away from the examination of Romans 4 thinking that we had no differences over what it meant.

I think that in this case, my Protestant friend truly just didn’t know that that is what his denomination teaches, but I don’t know whether he will change his statement of what he believes to bring it into alignment with the WCF or not. That’s part of working toward unity in the Christian Faith: start wherever you’re at and engage people wherever they are at. Ideally the exploration of what you each believe and why will help you grow in mutual understanding and respect of one another, which removes two large obstacles to achieving unity.

Finally, note that this post isn’t a knock on Protestants. Most Catholics do not know their faith well, either. It is imperative that both Catholics and Protestants work to educate themselves on what their Church or denomination teaches so that we are doing our part to work toward Christ’s prayer in John 17 that we be perfectly one, as He and the Father are one.

This seven minute podcast discusses whether it is reasonable for the Catholic Church to require her members to attend Mass weekly, receive the sacraments (at least occasionally), and require priests to be celibate. Wouldn’t it be more in line with human freedom to make everything optional? It’s the sixth argument in my book, 50 Roads to Rome.

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