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 is a frustrating conundrum in ecumenical apologetics: a Protestant, by the very nature of Protestantism, can at any moment say “My denomination teaches that? Yeah? Well I don’t believe they’re right about that, then.” This is what happens when authority rests on the individual and not on the Church.
It is difficult to set the stage between two competing systems of faith, because while the Catholic position is established, and Catholics as a whole assent to one body of teaching, Protestants feel free to pick-and-choose from many different Protestant theologies.
I have yet to find anyone who follows one Protestant system as devoutly as legitimate Catholics follow the Church’s body of teaching. I have yet to run into a Protestant who claims, “I am Lutheran, and I assent to every last iota of Martin Luther’s teaching” or “I am Reformed Protestant, and I assent to every proposition in the Westminster Catechism.”
Anytime you point out a significant flaw in their belief system, they have an always-available recourse: “Well, I personally don’t believe that.”
Brandon’s criticism of Protestants seems to me unfair. Part of what it means to be Protestant is (this is sort of obvious) to reject the authority of the Roman curia. It should come as no surprise that the Roman curia was not replaced by one at Lambeth or in Edinburgh (or elsewhere). Brandon is, then, blaming Protestants for being Protestants (or more precisely, for not being Roman Catholic) and wanting them to be something they are not before entering a discussion. You should, rather, expect it to be the case that you cannot find out what a Protestant thinks on this or that theological question by turning to any document or set of documents on the web – you’re going to have to ask him, as Devin found out. And Devin’s exactly right that doing so is good for everyone.
Thanks guys,
Kevin, I’ll respond a little:
It should come as no surprise that the Roman curia was not replaced by one at Lambeth or in Edinburgh (or elsewhere). Brandon is, then, blaming Protestants for being Protestants (or more precisely, for not being Roman Catholic) and wanting them to be something they are not before entering a discussion.
What is interesting is that, in practice, Protestants do replace Rome with *something else* and that something else is, for example, something like “Canterbury + N.T. Wright + a dash of Luther” or “Calvin + Turretin + Mark Driscoll + some other unique stuff I came up with”. So you’re right that the “something else” is not always a single authority but typically a mixture, often with a little “borrowing” from Catholic Tradition thrown in (usually unwittingly).
One problem with this approach is the fact that, for instance, Calvin really thought through things and came up with a (mostly) consistent systematic theology that all kind of fits together (even if it is wrong), but Joe Protestant’s cobbled together theology often isn’t nearly so consistent, and so there are often internal contradictions within a Protestant’s “custom” theology that they don’t realize.
So I agree that this is a reality, but it makes dialogue challenging because, instead of dealing with a known set of beliefs, you are dealing with custom patchwork quilt (or even sometimes a chimera that changes on you).
The bottom line is that Kevin needs to become Catholic.
Nothing to add. But what a great discussion. Thanks!
A quick reply: I don’t see why having to ask me what I believe about X “makes dialogue challenging.” It’s what you have to do for every dialogue, whether about baseball or Aristotle or natural law, regardless of whether the interlocutor is Protestant, RC, or atheist. Further, any given RC doctrine/dogma then be subject to such a wide variety of interpretations and understandings (hence all the misunderstandings that you rightly highlight on a consistent basis) that we Protestants constantly find ourselves having to do just the same thing you complain of, viz. having to ask our RC brethren what they believe instead of being able to assume it based upon this or that document/set of documents. So, the distinction here seems to me a distinction without a difference.
For what it’s worth, as a side note, and I would imagine you didn’t mean to imply otherwise, Joe Roman Catholic’s theology won’t be coherent either. Most people walk around with a jumbled mess of ideas in their heads. The noetic effects of sin!
Kevin does not yet see the need to become Roman Catholic.