It’s been a big year for Christian unity as Orthodox/Catholic talks have moved ahead, slowly but surely, and the Anglican Ordinariate has offered a way for Anglicans to come into communion with the Catholic Church without abandoning their English patrimony.

Though the things that divide us are important and compromise on fundamentals is not an acceptable road to unity, I believe that the things that unite us are greater, and much more powerful.

The creeds and councils that both Reformed and Catholics hold dear, the moral law that binds all men that we both defend, the reverence for the Scriptures as God’s holy word, these things bind us together against a world that opposes us on all these counts.

One particular aspect of the moral law that brings a particularly strong point of unity is our common defense of human life from conception to natural death against the legion of threats that assail life from all sides in our culture.

I make my living as a pro-life activist with the Pro-Life Action League and I’ve seen multiple examples of the cause of life bridging the gap between Reformed Christians and Catholics. It hasn’t always been so and it’s not always so now. I have seen pro-life protests devolve into Protestant/Catholic arguments, but I find it increasingly rare.

In 2007, when Planned Parenthood opened what was at the time the largest abortion mill in the country in Aurora, Illinois, where I live, literally thousands of Christians from every stripe came together to oppose this unwanted killing center in our town. Protestants and Catholics joined together in 24-hour a day prayer outside the facility in the days before it opened and they continue to this day to fight this scourge side by side.

That prayer effort continues to this day, though not on the same scale, and my colleagues and I continue to pray and strategize together with a group of Protestants and Catholics every couple of weeks to come together in our shared commitment to life that flows from our shared commitment to the Giver of Life.

The particular unity I’ve seen in my community over the issues of life and the wonderful fellowship I’ve shared on the front lines of the abortion battle with my protestant brothers and sisters has given me great hope for our eventual reunion. People who share such deep commitment to life in Christ cannot remain separated in worship forever.

As we approach this octave of prayer that our differences come to an end, and as we approach our shared feast of the Nativity of Our Lord, let’s focus on our shared commitments and let them increase our affection for each other in the Lord. And keep an eye on the blog. We’ll be posting more about the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity as it approaches.

We’ve got the whole rest of the year to discuss our differences, and we must if we are to attain the unity Our Lord so greatly desires for us. But for this one week, let’s foster our mutual loves and commitments for the good of all Christ’s Church.

Will Faithful Roman Catholics go to heaven from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

His simple answer is, “Of course, and of course not.” He explains, “If someone is a faithful Roman Catholic in the sense that they have memorized the Council of Trent and they do everything, they follow, they understand the teaching of the Roman Church, and they follow it, and they trust in that teaching—I don’t believe that such a person can be saved.”

On the other hand he also believes that there are many Roman Catholics who are “saved people” who nonetheless have inconsistencies in their belief. He explains this by saying that such Catholics rationalize or don’t really hold deep down to the Catholic teachings which Pastor Wilson believes would send them to Hell if they truly believed them the way the Catholic Church teaches them, such as the Church’s teaching on the veneration of Holy Images, which he holds to be idolatry.

I asked Pastor Wilson about such inconsistencies and what he would think about a specific intelligent faithful Catholic he knows who certainly believes and understands the teachings of the Catholic Church. As an example I used the influential orthodox Catholic thinker Robert George, who spoke at New St. Andrews’ College in Moscow’s commencement last year. He said he respected and enjoyed meeting Robert George, but gave this example to explain where he sees a person in George’s position:

For example, a man is told that it is okay to approach God through images, and he does so. Through various internal workarounds and rationalizations and inconsistencies (that I don’t understand), he manages to maintain a true faith in Jesus despite this. But without those rationalizations he would fall into idolatry simpliciter, be more consistent, and would be lost.

But this leaves us with an apparent contradiction. In the video, Wilson says the faithful Catholic who believes the Church’s teaching cannot be saved. Now he says that a faithful Catholic like Robert George can be saved as long as he has these internal workarounds.

Presumably the iconodule and the Catholic who believes the Council of Trent and the rest of Catholic dogmatic teaching both have “simple faith in Christ,” since having such a simple faith in Christ is a fundamental part of Catholic teaching, that is, if he doesn’t have simple faith in Christ, he doesn’t believe Trent. The only discernible difference seems to lie with the Council of Trent itself, notable for its formulation of justification which does not exclude works from the process of salvation in the same way the Reformation solas do.

The Protestant Must Protest

The Protestant, to remain Protestant, must hold that the issues that still divide Rome and Geneva are issues where salvation is at stake. If they are not, they are issues that do not justify continued schism within the body of Christ and they can and should have been worked out in the first place at the Reformation within the context and authority of the Catholic Church.

But Wilson knows there are Catholics who believe every last jot and tittle of Catholic teaching, but clearly have faith in Christ. If salvation is by faith alone, as the Reformed hold, workarounds must be provided for those Catholics who clearly have faith in Christ, but only so big as to allow for the admission of the iconodule, not the one who holds to the Tridentine formula on justification. Otherwise the Protestant protest necessarily dissolves.

Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus

The issue really boils down to what is meant by the ancient teaching that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church. Recognizing its importance, the Reformed try to hold to this teaching as well, as the Westminster Confession says:

The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.—Westminster Confession of Faith, XXV, II

But this gets tricky when you don’t believe that Jesus founded a visible, institutional Church. The lines get more and more blurry, since you dare not exclude your fellow Protestants from the fold despite the fact that, from the Reformed view, they have their own confusions on justification just as serious as the Catholic’s. But keeping the lines clear and distinct is all the more crucial for the Reformed Christian since he believes that his confessions are, in fact, the purest expression of the Christian faith.

Catholicism—More to Lose, More to Give

The irony is that the Catholic Church has much more on the line and yet considers outsiders in a much more gracious way than the Reformed. This is in part because of the great confidence the Catholic Church has in who and what she is. Since the fullness of the Church subsists in the Church in union with the Bishop of Rome, she has nothing to fear from other claimants to the title of “Truest Expression of the Christian Faith.”

And, given that the Catholic Church puts no boundaries on the reach of the grace of God, it is no stretch and no threat for the Church to proclaim that there are those outside the Catholic Church who could be saved, but any and all that are saved will be saved through the Catholic Church.

For the Church to proclaim that some outside her visible bounds may be saved, but that they will be saved by some form of communion with her doesn’t bring up the same inconsistencies that Pastor Wilson faces in holding that salvation is by faith in Christ alone but that there are those who have faith in Christ who cannot be saved.

The Catholic understanding of salvation is, in the end, a relational understanding, not a forensic one. So it does not trouble the Catholic Church to say that the Reformed person who holds to the Westminster Confession with all his heart but knows, loves and serves Jesus Christ will be accepted into eternal life. He is certainly at a serious disadvantage in the pursuit of holiness without all seven sacraments Christ gave the Church for that purpose, but the fundamental question is that of man’s will in relation to His God.

Certainly, invincible ignorance is a precondition for one who holds to heretical doctrines to be saved, but that ignorance is not contingent on the beliefs one holds. Invincible ignorance is ignorance of true doctrine that cannot be dispelled by moral diligence, which is intimately tied to the will. Simply believing and trusting the Westminster confession is not, on its own, a damnable offense, unlike Wilson’s example of the Catholic who holds to Trent and the rest of the Church’s teaching who cannot, in his estimation, be saved.

So, while maintaining absolute rigidity on the truths handed down from Christ to the Apostles, the Catholic Church is simultaneously untroubled by letting the streams of grace run where they will. There is no one who, in Pastor Wilson’s language, “could not be saved” on the basis of doctrinal opinion. And thanks be to God for that.

But fortunately for all concerned, Fr. Robert Barron, professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois has spent the last several years working on the Catholicism Project.

The purpose of the project is to present the story of the Catholic Church on its own terms by bringing viewers to the places where the Catholic story has taken place over the last two millennia. The 10 part video series, which will be available this fall with accompanying study guide, has been a labor of love for Fr. Barron. He’s spent the last several years putting this vivid, hands-on look at the Catholic Church together, and from the looks of it, it’s really paid off. Check out the latest trailer below:

I’m eager to use the program for my parish youth group, and I’m sure it will be a great resource for many Catholics and Protestants alike in gaining a deeper knowledge of the Catholic faith. On Fr. Barron’s site you can see more previews from each of the different locations he traveled to for the series and find out more about the project’s goals and methodology.

Fr. Barron also does regular video commentaries on cultural issues like current films and books that you can see on his Word On Fire YouTube channel. He also features conversations with important cultural figures like his series of discussions with former protestant pastor and current Catholic theology professor Scott Hahn that touch on many of the issues that continue to separate Catholics and Protestants. You can get a taste of those conversations in the video below:

We’re fortunate to be living in the time of this new evangelization that Pope John Paul II spoke of, where the power of new media can help Christians spread the message of Christ to greater audiences than ever before. I’m particularly thankful for the tireless work Fr. Barron is doing and I hope you’ll take a few minutes to check his work out too.

Within years of the 1930 Lambeth Conference, where Anglicans became the first Christian group to officially approve the use of contraceptives, contraception came to be viewed as an unquestionable human right even by many conservative Protestants. And it’s understandable from a pragmatic point of view. It can be a difficult issue for pastors to dictate what ought and ought not happen in the bedroom affairs of their parishoners. But lately, I’ve seen a few Reformed pastors thinking about the issue out loud and coming to some negative conclusions about the practice of artificial birth control.

Tim Baly took on the topic in conjunction with RU486 “medical” abortions last year, and more recently Doug Wilson chimed in with a video explaining his thoughts on the subject. Tim Challies has also weighed in with a two-part post on contraception here and here.

What Do Today’s Reformed Pastors Say?

All three come down pretty hard on the birth-control pill because of its abortifacient potential, though Wilson doesn’t mention the pill by name, he does refer to the command against destroying life as prohibiting the use of birth-control methods that work by abortifacient means. For those unfamiliar with the issue, the pill works by making the womb inhospitable to a pregnancy. If conception does take place, it becomes very difficult for the brand new baby to attach to the walls of the uterus and begin its gestation. In essence, the baby, only a few cells big, would starve to death.

There is no solid medical evidence that this does actually happen, but the manufacturers of the pill acknowledge it as a possibility in the instructions that come with the drugs. But even if the chance is remote, Christians have no place putting the lives of their children in jeopardy and I applaud these Reformed pastors for taking a stand against it for that reason.

Though Baly doesn’t weigh in on barrier methods of contraception, like condoms, both Wilson and Challies seem to find such methods acceptable provided the reasons are within the range they consider reasonable. Their criteria tend to center around Scripture’s repeated insistence that children are a blessing and a gift of God, that they are to be desired and treasured, not avoided for personal gain or ease.

Thus, Wilson states that a newly married couple avoiding children so they can make more money are in a problematic situation, while the couple with seven kids who are using contraception to postpone a pregnancy for a short time are doing just fine.

This seems to be a pretty common line in Reformed Christianity. The pill is perhaps to be avoided, but contraception in and of itself is not morally wrong, largely because Scripture does not say it is. Wilson’s video cites a fear of putting undue, Pharisaical burdens on people and Jim Jordan cites the same concern elsewhere.

If contraception other than the pill is considered wrong by modern Reformed theologians, it is not because of the nature of the act itself, but rather the motivations behind it.

What Does the Scripture Say?

Scripture is, of course, notoriously silent on contraception, at least in explicit terms. The go-to passage is the sin of Onan in Genesis 38—the only passage that explicitly mentions contraception. But I, along with many scholars on both sides of the Tiber, find this passage insufficient for building a case against contraception by itself.

Onan’s brother died and he married his brother’s wife according to the law in order to provide her with heirs. But instead of doing that, Onan practiced coitus interruptus and spilled his seed on the ground, thus affording him sexual pleasure and releasing him from the obligation to take care of any children the union might produce. For this, Onan was struck dead by the Lord.

Many argue that Onan’s sin was not spilling his semen per se, but rather the avoidance of his vowed duty to produce heirs for his sister-in-law. This does seem to be the case and for that reason I think the passage is not capable, on its own, of providing Christians with an air-tight ban on contraception. But, fortunately, the passage is not on its own. But more about Onan in a moment.

What Did the Reformers Say?

It should be noted that the Reformers stood united with the rest of the Christian tradition in opposing all forms of contraception. Indeed, as noted above, no Christian group of any kind approved of contraception till the early 20th century.

It is interesting to note that both Calvin and Luther did see enough evidence in Onan’s sin to condemn contraception outright, but I believe that is because both were steeped in the Catholic understanding of natural law.

Calvin had this to say in his commentary on Genesis:

It is a horrible thing to pour out seed besides the intercourse of man and woman. Deliberately avoiding the intercourse, so that the seed drops on the ground, is double horrible. For this means that one quenches the hope of his family and kills the son, which could be expected, before he is born. This wickedness is now as severely as is possible condemned by the Spirit, through Moses, that Onan, as it were, through a violent and untimely birth, tore away the seed of his brother out the womb, and as cruel as shamefully has thrown on the earth. Moreover he thus has, as much as was in his power, tried to destroy a part of the human race. When a woman in some way drives away the seed out the womb, through aids, then this is rightly seen as an unforgivable crime. Onan was guilty of a similar crime. (Calvin’s Commentary on Genesis, vol. 2, part 16)

And Luther had this to say in his commentary on Genesis:

“[T]he exceedingly foul deed of Onan, the basest of wretches . . . is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes, a sodomitic sin. For Onan goes in to her—that is, he lies with her and copulates—and, when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. Accordingly, it was a most disgraceful crime. . . . Consequently, he deserved to be killed by God. He committed an evil deed. Therefore, God punished him” (Luther’s Commentary on Genesis)

Why the Disconnect?

I believe the disconnect we see between the Reformers and their theological descendants stems from the implications of sola Scriptura that the Reformers didn’t see.

The ecclesial chaos caused by every man being his own arbiter of spiritual truth led, slowly, to the 1930 Lambeth Conference allowing for married couples to use contraception in extreme circumstances. Thus, the ancient teaching of the Church on this subject was breeched by a small exception. As is nearly always the case with such breeches, a small exception was soon opened into the wide corridor we now see where no institution as a whole will decry contraception as an objective evil except the Catholic Church.

The reason the Catholic Church is able to take such a stand is because of its view of Sacred Tradition as another sure source of knowledge of the things of God. If the sin of Onan leaves us unsure on whether or not contraception is forbidden by God, we need not despair or decide that forbidding contraception would be a Pharisaical burden, like Wilson and Jordan. The opening paragraph of the 4th Session of the Council of Trent put it this way:

The sacred and holy, ecumenical, and general Synod of Trent,–lawfully assembled in the Holy Ghost, the Same three legates of the Apostolic Sec presiding therein,–keeping this always in view, that, errors being removed, the purity itself of the Gospel be preserved in the Church; which (Gospel), before promised through the prophets in the holy Scriptures, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, first promulgated with His own mouth, and then commanded to be preached by His Apostles to every creature, as the fountain of all, both saving truth, and moral discipline; and seeing clearly that this truth and discipline are contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand; (the Synod) following the examples of the orthodox Fathers, receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety, and reverence, all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament—seeing that one God is the author of both—as also the said traditions, as well those appertaining to faith as to morals, as having been dictated, either by Christ’s own word of mouth, or by the Holy Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic Church by a continuous succession.

In Sacred Tradition we have a sure guide because the Tradition has its roots in Christ Himself and its protection from error from the promises of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit through the Apostolic Succession of bishops in union with the Roman Pontiff. So when we have an issue like contraception, which the Tradition of the Church has taught us is a moral evil from the time of the Apostles, we can know that this tradition is a reliable guide and not the mere opinion of men.

If we follow the model of sola Scriptura, where every man is his own interpreter and Scripture is the only available means of sure knowledge of morality, it’s only a matter of time until someone decides that it’s easier to give up the fight on contraception. The same thing has happened with a number of the Church’s teachings, such as those on divorce and remarriage, female clergy and homosexuality. Without the sure defense of the Spirit-guided Magesterium of the Catholic Church, compromise is inevitable.

So What’s the Big Deal About Contraception Anyway?

In an era where nearly every other Christian group has approved at least some method of contraception, why does the Catholic Church continue to oppose it so strenuously? The reason is simple: God created the sexual act with the three-fold purposes of procreation, the unifying of the couple and pleasure. To remove any one of these elements from the sexual act is to pervert it into something other than what God intended it to be. To remove the life-giving potential of the sexual act is to change its nature.

What makes a sexual act licit or illicit is whether or not it is performed in accordance with God’s design for sexual activity. Homosexual acts are illicit because God designed sex to be between a man and a woman. Adultery and fornication between a man and a woman are illicit because God intended sex to be between a married man and woman. Rape is illicit because God designed sexual union to be entered into willingly. Contraceptive sex acts are illicit because God designed sex to produce children.

When the procreative aspect of the sexual act is removed, the act takes on a different nature than it had when procreation was a possibility. As Pope John Paul II pointed out in his Theology of the Body talks, the couple engaging in contraceptive sex is lying with their bodies. The body is saying, “I am giving you the gift of my whole self,” but one of the most incredible gifts spouses can give to each other, their reproductive capacity, is being withheld. The act becomes primarily about pleasure and thus becomes inherently selfish. The act that is supposed to reflect the life-giving union of Christ and the Church becomes an act that seeks only its own temporal satisfaction, not the self-sacrifice and self-donation that comes with the possibility of the creation of new life.

This pleasure-centered version of sex is contrary to the nature of the Triune life which, as the Divine Liturgy reminds us, is fundamentally life-giving. If marriage is to be a picture of the life of the Trinity and the relationship of Christ and the Church, we can never say “no” to life and sacrifice, which is precisely what contraceptive sex does.

I’m encouraged by the attention being given to the question of contraception in Reformed circles and I hope the conversation continues. But I say that with the fervent hope that Reformed ministers will heed the words of the Reformers, as well as the voice of the Church throughout history, rather than relying on their own interpretations of Scripture. There is much more to be said on the topic, delving more deeply into Pope John Paul II’s teaching and even the many pragmatic problems with contraception, but I hope this post will serve to start some discussion on why this ancient teaching is so crucial to our Christian life today.

Additional Resources

• Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary on John Paul II’s “Gospel of the Body”—Christopher West’s excellent compendium of John Paul II’s groundbreaking series of addresses on the topic of human sexuality
• Tabor Life Institute—A ministry dedicated to spreading a Catholic understanding of sexuality
• CD Set of the “Contraception is Not the Answer” Conference—A conference sponsored by the Pro-Life Action League on the problem of contraception

The first half of the piece is an excellent and objective assessment of the undeniable dominance of the Catholic Church in nearly every area it would be possible to measure.

Trueman pays due honor to Catholicism’s unmatched contributions to theology, philosophy, architecture, liturgy, literature and science that he encountered first hand in Rome and encourages his fellow evangelicals to acknowledge these contributions in spite of our doctrinal differences.

St Anthony of Padua Healing a Youth
Sebastiano Ricci (c. 1690)
Musée du Louvre, Paris

In the second half of the article, Trueman notes another aspect of the Catholic faith that marks a sticky point between Catholics and Protestants and makes the thought of conversion unimaginable to him.

A reader asked for our thoughts on the article, so I thought I’d start with some of Trueman’s own words:

St Peter’s was not the only basilica I visited whilst in Italy. I also went to Padua and visited the famous Basilica of Saint Antony. Again, the architecture, internal and external, was impressive; but most striking of all were the remains of St. Anthony of Padua himself.

Most of him is actually contained in a large and mercifully opaque sarcophagus; but three particular bits are on display in clear glass jars in one of the side chapels. To be precise, there you will find his lower jaw (with definite signs of the saint having endured British dentistry), his vocal chords (most pleasant), and his tongue (some things are best left unsaid). They are easy to spot, being right next to a piece of the true cross, also on display.

What can I say about the shows of devotion and veneration which I witnessed around these cadaverous morsels? Frankly, I found them repellent, little more than a manifestation of the crassest kind of superstitious folk religion. This is what is so difficult to connect with Catholicism of the von Balthasar or Yves Congar or De Lubac variety. Great and brilliant as these men were, at ground level Catholicism looks like benighted old biddies doing homage before an amputated and pickled tongue.

It does not matter how many American evangelical leaders are wined and dined by the Roman See, or are taken by some cardinal to gaze upon Codex Sinaiticus, the tongue and its accoutrements remain as a silent testimony to superstition.

For those unfamiliar, St. Anthony was a powerhouse 13th century saint, called the “Hammer of Heretics” for his powerful preaching against the Cathares, Patarines and the Albegenses. Many miracles were wrought through him and he taught, preached and administered the sacraments in a powerful, albeit short, ministry. Anthony died at the age of 36 and his relics have been venerated and have produced miracles for these last 800 some odd years. For more, check out the Catholic Encyclopedia article on his life.

Now, I’ll leave aside the rude comments Trueman tosses at Catholic women who are his elders and of whom he ought not speak ill, especially behind their backs. But he is taking issue with something that many Protestants find very strange about the Catholic faith, namely our devotion to relics and other holy objects which our faith teaches possess some connection to the person from whence they came.

Could They Be Real?

I understand Carl’s trouble with this issue and I once shared it. It made no sense that these Catholics who are such intellectual giants could be taken in by what Carl sees and I saw as rank superstition. If they weren’t taken in by it, they were ignoring it which seemed somehow worse and like it would cause some awful cognitive dissonance.

The possibility that I never seriously entertained as a Protestant was that the Catholics might believe in things like relics not in spite of, but because of the incredible depth of the rest of their theology.

Trueman’s incredulity at the prospect of relics being genuine, to say nothing of miracle-working, comes through a bit further on, and I believe it’s that very possibility that makes it so difficult for Protestants, especially our Reformed brothers, to come to grips with the issue. It’s made even more difficult by the fact that the Reformed rarely even allow for the possibility that relics could be genuine, a true gift of God.

But the fact is that the historical record, the tradition of the Church and Sacred Scripture itself are full of examples of the very thing that Protestants decry as rank superstition.

Relics in Sacred Scripture

In the worldview presented to us by Sacred Scripture, we frequently see material objects take power from and serve as a connection to the person they came from—even the remains of those who have died. We see frequent examples of the importance of where remains lie and of marking the sites where those remains are laid.

In Acts 19:11-12, we see the following:

And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.

And in Acts 5:12-16:

Now many signs and wonders were regularly done among the people by the hands of the apostles. And they were all together in Solomon’s Portico. None of the rest dared join them, but the people held them in high esteem. And more than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them. The people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits, and they were all healed.

And of course, miracles were also performed through Jesus’ own clothes, but lest foul be called on citing that this happened through the Godman uniquely, the examples above were performed through the agency of mere men and their clothes and shadows. So a biblical worldview must have room for inanimate objects as vessels of God’s power.

God of the Living and the Dead

Now, my Protestant brothers may raise the objection that these examples happened through living persons, not dead ones as is often the case with Catholic relics. Not so fast.

In 2 Kings 13:20-21, we read:

So Elisha died, and they buried him. Now bands of Moabites used to invade the land in the spring of the year. And as a man was being buried, behold, a marauding band was seen and the man was thrown into the grave of Elisha, and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and stood on his feet.

So now our Biblical worldview has to allow for healing through inanimate objects touched by holy people, as well as the healing power of the bones of the holy dead.

A World Shot Through with Magic

We do not live in a world that is qualitatively different than the world in which these things took place. In fact, you could support the idea that we should still expect these things to take place by the same logic as Reformed Christians rightly argue that it would be strange if 1st century Christians didn’t baptize their children. The truly odd occurrence would be if miracles through the agency of the bones and belongings of God’s people stopped happening.

Catholics don’t have a blind spot when it comes to relics, Catholic theology simply reads and accepts what Sacred Scripture teaches, what the evidence of history bears out and the obvious implications of the incarnation.

Truly, the implications of the incarnation are what the Church’s teaching about relics really point to. The fact is that God uses physical matter to transmit his power and to do his work in the world. We live in a world shot through with magic. God has become man, and in doing so has charged the world with spiritual power. Even shadows can perform miracles! What wondrous enchantment is that?

I truly appreciate Mr. Trueman’s perspective and his attempt to speak with gusto about the parts of Catholicism he appreciates. But this aspect of Catholic theology cannot be understood without understanding the depth of Catholic theology when it comes to the relationship of human being after death and his body which remains on earth till the resurrection. Bryan Cross goes into this in a comment on a earlier post here at CtC:

Not only do the saints in heaven see God (as I explained above), but they retain a relation to their body. It is an ontological relation (i.e. a relation of being—this body does not merely belong to that saint, as he might have possessed a book or a cloak; this body is that saint, not the entirety of the saint, of course, but nonetheless his bodily component). The relation of the saints in heaven to their bodies is also an eschatological relation. They wait patiently to be reunited to their bodies, at the resurrection. To stand before the body of a saint is to stand before a part of someone who is presently enjoying the Beatific Vision, and is presently related (by an ontological relation of identity and an eschatological relation) to this body; it is to stand before something that we know (by the authority of the Church) will be in heaven forever. (We do not know that, with the same certainty, about any other material object, including our own bodies, because “that I [insert your own name] will persevere in faith until death” is not part of the deposit of faith.)

So we see the strong connection between the spiritual and the material that permeates Catholic theology. The body of a saint doesn’t cease to be “his” merely because he has gone to be with God in the spirit for the time being. To abandon the bones of a holy man of God like St. Anthony or like the prophet Elisha would be unthinkable to people who truly believe in the incarnation, which united humanity with the Godhead, and who believe in the resurrection of that actual body that lies in the crypt in the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua.

The “benighted biddies” worshiping a pickled tongue as Mr. Trueman puts it above are the ones who truly understand the nature of the universe and the miracles beyond comprehension that God has wrought and promises to accomplish in the future. They don’t hope for resurrection in some abstract sense. They know that St. Anthony’s tongue is really and truly his and will be put back in the mouth from whence it came one day by God’s glorious power. Remembering the saint and asking his intercession now, in the presence of his earthly remains, is the work that puts faith in the resurrection into action.

In closing, Mr. Trueman heads off what he perceives to be one way intelligent Catholics deal with the phenomenon of relics, which is to disavow relics as antiquated superstition and not really a part of the Catholic religion, Mr. Trueman says:

. . . it will not do simply to say that the practices of such ["superstitious" Catholics] are not significant; they are significant, at least for anyone who takes seriously their Catholicism.

Indeed they are. Just not in a negative way. I used to cringe at the site of a reliquary. In fact, my parish has a relic of St. Ambrose, my eldest son’s namesake, which I ignored for a long time. I had trouble believing that it was really a piece of St. Ambrose or that it could really do any good.

But time, experience and the Biblical and theological evidence have all played a role in helping me embrace what the Church teaches about relics. That relic in particular has since become a real touchstone in my interaction with the saints in heaven and my son’s patron.

I invite our Protestant brothers to truly consider the nature of the world we live in, the implications of the incarnation and the weight of the words of Scripture on the subject before tossing relics into the dustbin with all the other perceived superstitions and Romish aberrations.

St. Francis, born in 1567 to a wealthy family, led an interesting life, the details of which are too great to expound here, but I recommend the Catholic Encyclopedia article on his life for a good recounting of the details.

Statue of St. Francis De Sales at St. Peter's Basilica

For our purposes, the most important aspect of Francis’ life and ministry was his mission to convert the Calvinists of Geneva. In 1594, a young priest at the age of 27, he volunteered to evangelize the Calvinists there.

Francis’ ministry was not well received by the Calvinists at first. In fact, most of them wouldn’t even talk to him. As such, Francis turned to the tactic of writing pamphlets that he would slip under the door of the people of the town. These tracts were later collected into a book called The Catholic Controversy that can be read in its entirety at the preceding link. Of course, what passed for a tract in those days is much more like what we would call a scholarly essay, so the book is a very meaty examination of the problems that separate Calvinists and Catholics.

Little by little, Francis gained himself a hearing among the Calvinists and eventually converted them by the thousands. His success was so great that he was later elevated to the post of Bishop of Geneva.

I have found it interesting how many converts to Catholicism from the Reformed faith have found De Sales work so compelling, even to this day. Speaking for myself, his chapter on the concept of the mission of ministers of God was one of the turning points in my own conversion.

I hope our Reformed brothers will give a hearing to this very holy man of God whose work resonates down through the centuries.

To download the mp3, right click here.

This article intends to show that, though Protestants agree with the Catholic Church on the basic truths about Scripture and its authority, the Reformed view of Scripture errs in three respects: in its assumption about the canon of Scripture, in its view of the authority of Scripture, and in its view of the role of Sacred Scripture in the life of the Church. These errors are harmful to the faith, and the truth proclaimed by the Catholic Church about its Sacred books is the perfect corrective. I will begin this examination of the authority of Sacred Scripture with our points of agreement.

Contents:

I. Points of Agreement
II. Errors of the Reformed View
III. Correctives Provided by the Catholic View

I. Points of Agreement

The Catechism of the Catholic Church declares that God is the author of Scripture, that the Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit and without error¹, that Scripture cannot be rightly interpreted without the aid of the Holy Spirit, that the Old and New Testaments are both the word of God, both binding on men for all time, that the Old and New Testaments are one unity of revelation, and that, consequently, one cannot be rightly understood without the other.

To quote from the Catechism:

In order to reveal himself to men, in the condescension of his goodness God speaks to them in human words: “Indeed the words of God, expressed in the words of men, are in every way like human language, just as the Word of the eternal Father, when he took on himself the flesh of human weakness, became like men.”²

In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it not as a human word, “but as what it really is, the word of God.” In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them.³

I know our Reformed brothers will approve of each and every one of these points, as the
Westminster Confession of Faith states the following:

Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto His Church; and afterwards for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing; which makes the Holy Scripture to be most necessary; those former ways of God’s revealing His will unto His people being now cease.  ⁴

Here we stand as Reformed Christians and Catholics together claiming Sacred Scripture to be the word of God given for the salvation of the world. Together we deny that Sacred Scripture is merely a collection of historical books or the wise words of human authors.

We agree further that the Word of God recorded in Sacred Scripture has a special place in the life of the Church: as its guide, as its greatest earthly treasure, and as its greatest source of wisdom and guidance. This has been the case in the Catholic Church from her inception down to the present, as a few quotations from the Fathers and councils of the Catholic Church suffice to show:

These books are the fountains of salvation, so that he who thirsts may be satisfied with the oracles contained in them: in these alone the school of piety preaches the Gospel; let no man add to or take away from them. (St. Athanasius, Festal Letters, 39.)

[H]e will find there in much greater abundance things that are to be found nowhere else, but can be learnt only in the wonderful sublimity and wonderful simplicity of the Scriptures. (St. Augustine, De Doctr. Christ., 2,42,63.)

‘As a trusty door, Scripture shuts out heretics, securing us from error…’ (St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, Joann. 58.)

Therefore, like the Christian religion itself, all the preaching of the Church must be nourished and regulated by Sacred Scripture. For in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life. Consequently these words are perfectly applicable to Sacred Scripture: “For the word of God is living and active” and “it has power to build you up and give you your heritage among all those who are sanctified.” (Dei Verbum, 21, quoting Hebrews 4:12, Acts 20:32, and citing 1 Thessolonians 2:13.)

When we examine the very earliest days of the Church, through the time of the Fathers, even through the divisions of the Reformation, down to the Second Vatican Council, we see that Catholics and Reformed Christians have significant common ground in our understanding of Sacred Scripture.

Before advancing to our points of disagreement, let us pause for a moment and thank the consubstantial Trinity for preserving in us all a love and reverence for Sacred Scripture, which will surely be integral to the reunion for which we all pray.

II. Errors of the Reformed View

But advance we must, for there remain divisions between us on the nature and number of the books of Sacred Scripture, as well as the nature of its authority. Protestants view the books of Sacred Scripture as the complete revelation of God and sole arbiter of all theological disputes whereas the Catholic Church has always taught that Sacred Scripture is a part of the Deposit of faith, along with Sacred Tradition and the living Magisterium of the Church. These are some of the most fundamental issues that have divided us for centuries and will continue to do so until we can come to a common understanding.

I intend to address three of the errors in the Reformed doctrine of Sacred Scripture, and then proceed to consider how the Catholic doctrine of Scripture provides a corrective for these errors and a proper understanding of the authority of the Scriptures. The first Reformed error I will address is the deficiency of its standards for determining which books are a part of the canon of Sacred Scripture. Among the different Protestant communities there are numerous views of the way in which the canon of Sacred Scripture was established, and space does not allow for all of them to be addressed.⁵  I will therefore address the Reformed views which seem to be the most widely held.

How Do We Know?
The first problem is one of epistemology. For all the many attempts to prove otherwise, two of which I examine below, Protestants simply have no way to verify a canon apart from a subjective internal witness. R.C. Sproul claims that we have a “fallible collection of infallible books,”⁶ but on what basis can he know that each of these books is infallible? It has never been the view of the Church that the books of Sacred Scripture are anything less than an infallible and trustworthy standard.

Sproul argues that Scripture claims infallibility for itself, but that there are other fallible authorities in the world, such as the Church, that are nonetheless authoritative in spite of their fallibility. According to Sproul, on the basis of the Church as an institution founded by God acting with His authority, we can trust that the Scriptures were rightly identified by the Church.

But the claim that we have a fallible collection of infallible books does not solve the problem of how we know which books are inspired and which are not; in fact it creates more problems. His argument points to the Scriptures as evidence supporting the claim that the Scriptures are infallible. But the evidence supporting the claim that the Scriptures are infallible is unavailable unless we already know which books belong to the canon. Even beyond that problem, there is an additional question: if we can trust God to guide the Church to establish a canon of infallible books, why can we not trust her when she explains to us what these books mean? The Protestant answer is, of course, to compare the later teachings of the Church to the teachings of Scripture. But this brings us right back to square zero. If the Church can err, for example, in proclaiming that icons ought to be venerated, she can err just as easily in compiling a canon, and it would be ad hoc to allow ecclesial infallibility in establishing the canon but deny infallibility in every other ecclesial activity.

The fallibility of the canon, of course, presents its own problems. The fallible list could be excluding divinely inspired books that commend us to offer prayers for the dead, that could lead  (and have led) many into the grievous error of not praying for the souls of the faithful departed or a host of other doctrines. Furthermore, there would be no way for the Protestant Christian to know if that was the case.

Those taking Sproul’s argument will often cite the “self-authenticating” nature of the books of Sacred Scripture. John Calvin is one of the defenders of this view. In his Institutes, Calvin writes:

Nor is there any room for the cavil, that though the Church derives her first beginning from [the foundation of the writings of the Apostles and prophets], it still remains doubtful what writings are to be attributed to the Apostles and prophets, until her judgement is interposed. For if the Christian Church was founded at first on the writings of the prophets, and the preaching of the Apostles, that doctrine, wheresoever it may be found, was certainly ascertained and sanctioned antecedently to the Church, since, but for this, the Church herself never could have existed.⁷

First of all, Calvin states that “that doctrine, wheresoever it may be found, was certainly ascertained and sanctioned antecedently to the Church.” But the fact that people in the Church can distinguish true and false (nonapostolic) doctrine, does not entail that there was no doubt about “what writings are to be attributed to the Apostles,” nor that the interposition of the Church’s judgment was unnecessary. Certainly the Apostles’ doctrine was clearly known by the early Church, but that alone did not make it perfectly clear to later generations receiving Christian teaching amidst any number of false teachers which books contained the actual Apostolic teaching or even which had an actual connection to Christ and the Apostles.

But St. Paul seems to indicate there is more than meets the eye in this foundation of the Apostles and prophets when he calls the Church, not the Scriptures, the very pillar and ground of truth.⁸ The Church certainly contains the teachings of the Apostles, but the Church is not only the teachings of the Apostles. The Church’s foundation also contains the living magisterium and deposit of faith we see working already in the time of the Apostles in Acts 15. Without this foundation, we could not know the teachings of the Apostles and Prophets. We see after St. Paul’s death the importance of the divinely ordained authority of the Magisterium when multiple written works bearing the names of the Apostles and containing diverse and sometimes contradictory messages would appear. St. Paul was, at Our Lord’s command, setting up the Church as the judge and protector of doctrinal orthodoxy. Further, as I will explore below, this is not a function a book is even capable of performing, as a book cannot explain its own meaning when questions about that meaning arise.

It is interesting to note that St. Paul says that the Church is founded on “the Apostles and Prophets,”⁹ but Calvin renders it “the teachings of the Apostles and Prophets.” He does not allow the passage say what St. Paul actually says: the men themselves and the authority given to them by God are the foundation of the Church. This divinely appointed authority is what gives weight to their teaching and gives authority to their interpretation, and is thus more foundational to the Church  than the teaching itself. This is why St. Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to hold to both the written and unwritten traditions of the Apostles¹⁰. Nowhere in Sacred Scripture do we find the common Protestant assumption that all the essential information concerning Christ and the Apostles’ teaching would be codified in written form.

It should be noted, however, that although the authority of the Church’s Magisterium is foundational and binding, the Church still holds the Scripture in the highest place of honor and authority. The Magisterium is the servant of the Scripture, and, as the Catechism says, “with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully.”¹¹

Next Calvin offers his understanding of the Catholic Church’s view of her own position in relation to the Scriptures which, as we will see, is directly contrary to the Church’s stated self-understanding:

Nothing therefore can be more absurd than the fiction, that the power of judging Scripture is in the Church, and that on her nod its certainty depends. When the Church receives it, and gives it the stamp of her authority, she does not make that authentic which was otherwise doubtful or controverted but, acknowledging it as the truth of God, she, as in duty bounds shows her reverence by an unhesitating assent.¹²

This section sets up a straw man of the Catholic position. The Catholic Church did not teach in Calvin’s time, nor has she ever taught, that her stamp of approval on a book makes it God’s Word. It is almost as if Calvin believed that the Church thought, by declaring a text to belong to the Word of God, that she makes it into the the Word of God, or that she could turn around tomorrow and declare that St. Matthew’s gospel is no longer the Word of God. The Council of Trent refers to the books the council had “received,” and Dei Verbum¹³ uses precisely the same language of receiving. To imply that the Church ever taught that her fiat makes the word of God authentic is misleading and incorrect. The Church’s position has always been one of recognizing the authenticity of the great treasure that has been handed down to her.

When the Church tells her members what books are Scripture, she operates in exactly the same way she does in all other matters of faith and morals. Tobit is inspired not because the Church says so; the Church says so because Tobit is inspired.  Abortion is wrong not because the Church says so; the Church says so because abortion is wrong.  We can trust her authority on these matters far more than we can trust our own intuition or reason.

Now Calvin gets to the meat of the argument, that is, that the Scriptures are so self-evidently what they are that it is plain to anyone with a conscience which books are in and which are out:

As to the question, How shall we be persuaded that it came from God without recurring to a decree of the Church? it is just the same as if it were asked, How shall we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Scripture bears upon the face of it as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black do of their colour, sweet and bitter of their taste.¹⁴

The claim that the Scriptures identify themselves is a falsifiable proposition but it is being treated as unfalsifiable by those who hold it. In his preface to the book of Revelation, Martin Luther wrote, “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.”  How could a person argue with Luther about what he could or could not “detect” in the text? If Calvin claims his sixty-six books identify themselves, we should be able to conduct blind “divinely-inspired-test” experiments to confirm his hypothesis. It also raises the question of why there were such disputes in the early Church about what was and was not Scripture. If it is as easy as telling black from white, then there should have been no disagreement in the early Church about the identity of canonical books. But there was manifestly such debate, and for no small period of time.

To look back centuries later and claim that the canon is self-evidently what it is denies history and falls prey to the very same mentality according to which the King James Bible fell out of Heaven whole and complete. Many of our brothers in some of the anti-intellectual forms of fundamentalism give no thought at all to the historical origin of Scripture. They have their Bible, the Spirit testifies unto their spirit that it is the Word of God, and that’s good enough for them. This claim that the identity of the canon is self-evident is in this respect exactly like the claim of the fundamentalist who ignores the historical development of the canon.

The Protestant is in agreement with the Catholic Church in the belief that the books of the canon of Scripture are the very words of God, but the Catholic has a better reason for believing so. The proposed ground of the Protestant’s epistemic certainty of the infallibility of the canon lies precisely in the books he is seeking to prove are infallible; and that certainty is primarily based on a handful of citations from St. Paul’s epistles. By contrast, the Catholic’s certainty rests in a hierarchy established by Jesus Himself that claims a call from God the Father, promises from Jesus, and the protection of the Holy Spirit over the Church in establishing and preserving true doctrine. Assuming the truth of our shared premise that God exists in a Trinity of divine Persons, the Catholic Church’s claim has a sound Trinitarian bedrock, while the Protestant claim of self-authentication trusts neither the Trinity nor the Church, but rather relies on the intellectual prowess of a handful of 16th century intellectuals, the Reformers, and their ability to discern true Scripture from false. In the worst case scenario, the Protestant claim relies on every man doing what is right in his own eyes, depending on which books the Holy Spirit testifies to his spirit are the Word of God.

In light of this, it hardly seems surprising that when the Westminster Confession of Faith lists its canon, it does so completely without commentary or substantive proof texts. This is a striking difference from the form of the rest of the Confession which goes into such incredible detail in defending from Scripture and other sources the things it claims. Not so with the canon. The Protestant canon is apparently to be accepted on its own self-evidence. But it is not in keeping with the doctrine of sola scriptura to take a doctrine as essential as this on the basis of a supposed self-authentication that is not taught in Sacred Scripture.

So we see that one problem with the Reformed view of Scripture is its inability to account for the determination of the canon of Scripture, and thus for the authority of Scripture. For if we cannot determine with certainty which books are and are not God-breathed, we have no means for discerning which teachings are true and binding on Christians and which are not.

An Unbiblical View of the Authority of Scripture

A second problem with the Reformed view is that it attributes to Sacred Scripture a functional capacity that Sacred Scripture does not claim for itself. The Protestant view attempts to ascribe to Sacred Scripture the role of final court of appeal in matters of faith and morals, citing the theory that clear passages will elucidate those that are unclear. But such notions are simply not found in Sacred Scripture.

The Westminster Confession makes this claim:

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.¹⁵

But in attempting to substantiate the claim, it only produces the following proof texts:

And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.¹⁶

These verses are wonderful and true, but they claim that all Scripture is useful for doctrine, reproof, etc.; not that only Scripture is useful for these purposes, or that Scripture can accomplish them in a vacuum, that is, apart from the divinely appointed teaching and interpretive authority of the Church. Scripture interpreted correctly is good for all the things St. Paul mentions. Scripture interpreted incorrectly leads to heresy, division, and the destruction of souls. What this passage fails to prove is that Sacred Scripture by itself is able to do all the things St. Paul mentions.

In interpreting these verses, we must also consider the state of the New Testament canon. Since most of the New Testament was unwritten at the time St. Paul was writing, he could only have been referring here to the Old Testament. So the Scriptures that will equip the man of God for every good work cannot be the Scriptures St. Paul is writing as he writes this, much less the ones that will be written after. And even if the written books will equip, this passage does not tell us whether or not they do so in the context of the Church’s interpretive authority. Thus, these verses do not show that Sacred Scripture is sufficient to lead the Church on its own without an interpretive authority.

The confession’s next citation is from II Thessalonians:

That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.¹⁷

This verse does not show the sufficiency of Sacred Scripture as a supreme rule, especially since Sacred Scripture is not mentioned in it. St. Paul argues that the Thessalonians ought not to be shaken from the message delivered to them. This in no way implies that this message is fully contained in the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon.

So we see that the WCF’s citations do not back up its claims, but we might still wonder whether Church history would help the Protestant position. After all, the quotations at the beginning of this article made it clear that the Church Fathers had a very lofty view of Sacred Scripture. But it must be noted that the same Church Fathers whom we saw above speaking in such elevated prose about the virtues and supremacy of Sacred Scripture believed doctrines not taught explicitly or by good and necessary consequence in Sacred Scripture.

Take as an example the following quotations from each of the Fathers mentioned above, on the Catholic Church’s teachings on Mary, Jesus’ mother:

The self-same who was born of the Virgin is, in truth, King and the Lord God. And on His account, she who gave Him birth is properly and truly proclaimed Queen, Lady and Mother of God. . . . And standing now as Queen at the right hand of her Son the King of all, she is celebrated in Sacred Writ as clad around with the gilded clothing of incorruption and immortality, and surrounded with variety. . . . Let us say then again and again as we look up to Our King, Our Lord and God, and to Our Queen, Our Lady and Mother of God: The Queen stood at thy right hand, in gilded clothing, surrounded with variety. (St. Athanasius, Epist. ad Marcellin. in Interpret. Psalm, sec. 1.)

We must except the Holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom I wish to raise no question when it touches the subject of sins, out of honor to the Lord; for from Him we know what abundance of grace for overcoming sin in every particular was conferred upon her who had the merit to conceive and bear Him who undoubtedly had no sin. (St. Augustine, Nature and Grace, 36:42.)

It is truly right to bless you, O Theotokos, ever blessed and most pure, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim, without defilement you gave birth to God the Word. True Theotokos we magnify you.  (St. John Chrysostom, Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.)

We see here the same men who above reveled in the glory of Sacred Scripture espousing doctrines found in Sacred Scripture only in type or shadow. These doctrines certainly are not presented in Scripture in any sense that would satisfy the Westminster Divines.

So whatever these Fathers meant in speaking of the primacy of Scripture, it did not rule out believing doctrines not found explicitly in Scripture. These and all the other Fathers of the Church who held Scripture in incredibly high esteem also believed in the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist and its sacrificial character, the succession of Christ’s authority in the Church through the episcopacy, the ministerial priesthood, and the Catholic understanding of the communion of the Saints, to name a few examples. St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Lectures¹⁸ are an excellent resource for seeing all of these doctrines taught as common knowledge in the early Church.

In the Fathers we find that Scripture was used in the context of what the Church already knew to be true, that is, the deposit of faith handed down both in Sacred Scripture and the unwritten traditions of the Apostles cited above by St. Paul. Even though these doctrines concerning Our Lady are found explicitly only in Sacred Tradition, the Fathers quoted above clearly valued them just as highly as those doctrines explicitly taught in Sacred Scripture. Scripture took ultimate pride of place in the early Church, to be sure, but it did not take that place in a vacuum.

Since this was the understanding of the place of Sacred Scripture in the Church from the earliest times, the burden of proof rests on the Westminster Confession and its defenders to prove from Scripture that their view is correct. The small smattering of proof texts offered fails to meet that burden because these texts do not display the Westminster Confession’s actual position from the Scriptures, and that position is clearly not the standard held by the early Church or any stage of the Church prior to the Reformation.

What Can A Book Do?

Finally, the Reformed view also ascribes to Sacred Scripture a capacity that, on a purely practical level, a book simply cannot bear.

A book provides words that must be interpreted to be understood. A person speaking to us in person, like the Apostles speaking to the early Churches, can explain the meaning of his speech. A book cannot elucidate problem passages for us. Given the fallibility of human understanding and the diversity of perspectives regarding interpretation, especially over the span of 2,000 years of Church history, it is simply not possible that a book by its very nature could be the supreme rule of faith and doctrine. At least it cannot do this if we expect there to be a consistent understanding of this book that would work itself out into consistent faith and practice. A human, or set of humans, must make the final decision about the meaning of written texts.

The Protestant response, of course, is an appeal to perspicuity. The doctrine of the perspicuity of the Scriptures refers to the claim that the Scriptures are able, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to make the truths essential to salvation known to any reader. The WCF states:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.¹⁹

The citation given to support this claim is from the Psalmist:

The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple.²⁰

Certainly the Law of the Lord brings understanding to the simple, but the Confession’s interpretation mistakenly identifies “the Law of the Lord” with the modern Protestant canon of Scripture. This verse in no way entails that the simple can “obtain a sufficient understanding” of the Scriptures without any aid or guidance.

But even if there were a case to be made from the Scriptures for the perspicuity of the Scriptures, reality tells a different story. Learned Scripture scholars and even the revered figures of various modern Reformed communities cannot agree on what “the gospel” is, much less on the meaning of the Sacraments or any number of other topics of great doctrinal importance. The Federal Vision controversy is a striking testament to this discord. This, of course, is why we see such disparate faiths and practices among our Protestant brothers, even among our Reformed brothers who hold to a common set of confessions. The Reformed have 21 denominations in Switzerland, 14 in the UK and 44 in the US, all divided because of some irreconcilable doctrinal difference.

This is also the source of continual splitting that the history of the Reformed denominations has borne out. When each individual, or even each presbytery or each denomination decides where the boundaries of orthodoxy are on the basis of its own understanding of Sacred Scripture, even with the guide of the Reformed confessions, division at least every fifty years or so is practically a design feature.²¹

Unless there is an arbiter of these interpretive disagreements, there will necessarily be division and disagreement about basic tenets of the Christian faith. This division is contrary to Christ’s prayer in John 17 and unacceptable for the witness of the Church to the outside world.

From these historical facts, we see that a book simply does not have the capacity in and of itself to function in the way the Westminster Confession claims it must function. A book cannot resolve an interpretive dispute about itself, decide who is right in a doctrinal controversy, or address any areas that it does not address. If Scripture were intended to do this, as Protestants claim, we would not see the history of division and infighting that we see. Indeed, the entirety of the Protestant experiment hinges on the truth of the idea that the Scriptures were intended to function as described by the Westminster Confession. The Scripture’s inability to perform the ecclesial function expected of it by the Confession is one of the more common factors provoking Protestants to consider the claims of the Catholic Church, and eventually leave their communities to seek full communion with the body that Christ founded to give us the true interpretation of Sacred Scripture.

III. Correctives Provided by the Catholic View

God be praised, the view of Scripture handed down from Christ to the Apostles and through the unbroken succession of Bishops in union with the Pope answers and corrects each of these errors in the Protestant position. In this section we will examine how each of the errors in the Reformed view is corrected by the teaching of the Catholic Church about Sacred Scripture.

The Epistemology Problem

The Catholic Church’s teaching on Scripture avoids the epistemological problems laid out above concerning the origin and authority of Scripture. An important key to understanding authority in the Church, and thus the Scripture, is the Council of Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15. This first Ecumenical Council gives us a model of the way the Apostles understood authority in the Church.

The Council was convened to answer the following question: do Gentiles have to be circumcised to become Christians? The Scriptures extant at the time did not answer the question, otherwise there would have been no need for the Council. What did the Apostles do? They called a council consisting of themselves and the presbyters they had ordained.

At this Council the Apostles and their successors debated this question, using what the Jewish Scriptures taught and what Christ had taught them in His earthly ministry. They issued a decree that was binding on all Christians. It is important to note that this was not merely a council of the Apostles, but also of the presbyters they had ordained, who took full part in the Council.  As we see in Acts 15:4-6:

When they arrived in Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church, as well as by the apostles and the presbyters, and they reported what God had done with them. But some from the party of the Pharisees who had become believers stood up and said, “It is necessary to circumcise them and direct them to observe the Mosaic law.” The apostles and the presbyters met together to see about this matter.

The assumption of the continuity of authority between the Apostles and their successors is apparent at this council. The presbyters ordained by the Apostles were present and it was these very same men, and those ordained by them that ruled over the further ecumenical councils of the Church. It is precisely the pattern of the Council of Jerusalem–of bishops gathering and proclaiming their decisions to be binding with the authority of the Holy Spirit–that the Church has followed throughout her history, from Jerusalem to Vatican II.

The same authority by which the Apostles and the presbyters whom they ordained declared that Gentiles did not have to be circumcised is the authority by which Trent declared the canon of Scripture. The pattern of the councils of the Church, clearly visible from the earliest councils, made clear that the Bishops at those councils perceived themselves to be citing the same episcopal and apostolic authority and calling on the same Holy Spirit for the same kind of binding decree.

The extent of the authority of the council is the same as well, that is to say, it was binding on every Christian. If we can reject Trent’s authority on the canon, we can reject the findings of Jerusalem, Nicea, Chalcedon, and any other finding of any Church council we please. Otherwise we need a principled reason to accept some and reject others. Again, an arbiter of some sort over the entire process is clearly needed, which is exactly how conciliar and papal authority have functioned in the Church for two thousand years. There is no other Scriptural pattern on which to base Church polity and the resolution of doctrinal disputes.

The example of the Bereans, a passage oft cited by Protestants to warrant holding the written text as the supreme interpretive authority, fails to produce that kind of pattern for two reasons. First, the Bereans were individual people exercising their consciences, no different from someone outside the Church checking the Church’s message against itself before believing. In no sense are the Bereans an example of Church polity or how the Church handles in-house disputes. The Bereans were a group of individual Jews deciding whether or not they would join the early Christians. Second, the appeal to the Bereans as a pattern falls flat for the Protestant because the Bereans checked the Apostles’ teachings against the Old Testament. Those who accepted the testimony of the Apostles held the Apostles’ teaching as a new source of revelatory truth, as all other Christians did. The example of the Bereans does nothing if not prove the superiority of oral testimony. Further, the example of the Bereans proves too much for the Protestant. Acts tells us that some of the Bereans believed the Apostles, which implies that some did not. So the example of the Bereans makes clear that individuals searching the Scriptures and determining for themselves which sources of revelation and authority to accept leaves the door wide open to error and self-deception.

Since the Catholic Church has from its inception followed this pattern of accepting the authority of the Apostles and their successors to lead her into all truth, no such epistemological quandary as we find in Protestantism is produced by Catholic doctrine. Catholic doctrine is not restricted to a “fallible collections of infallible books,” nor is there any need for temporary and unbiblical ad hoc infallibility to be attributed to the Church in determining the canon, nor any need for question-begging self-authentication. All that is needed is what Christ left for us, the sound foundation of the Church passed down from Christ to the Apostles to their successors.

The Problem of the Nature of Books

The Catholic Church’s doctrine also solves the problem of trying to use a book for a purpose a book cannot serve. The authority of Christ, given to His Apostles to call upon the Holy Spirit to lead them into truth (John 16:13) was given to the Bishops who succeeded them. (II Timothy 1:6) As we see in 2 Tim 1:6, St. Paul refers to the gift of the Spirit given to Timothy by him. Through the succession of bishops, this same authority guides how we understand the Scriptures today, and guides it perfectly. The Catholic Church does not rely on Sacred Scripture alone to make herself clear, anymore than the Apostles relied on the Hebrew Scriptures alone to make clear the full content of the gospel. They relied on the oral teachings they had received from Christ and on the power and authority of the Holy Spirit working in their midst to make the truth clear. The Catholic Church has followed this pattern for all of its history and, furthermore, no conception of perspicuity such as that proposed by Reformed theology can be found anywhere in Church history prior to the Reformation.

With confidence in the protection from error in the Church’s infallible teachings on issues of faith and morals given to the Church by the Holy Spirit through Christ’s promise (John 16:13), we can value and venerate Sacred Scripture. At the same time we are not forced to require that it interpret itself for us. Likewise, we do not have to force the Scriptures to produce a clear passage to interpret every difficult passage. This is a particularly baffling requirement of the Westminster Confession, because it leaves us once more with no arbiter to decide which passage is difficult and which corresponding clear passage explains it.

The Catholic position provides a remedy for division and disagreement, as the sure word of the Church is the dividing line between orthodoxy and heresy. Each person need not look for a burning in his bosom to distinguish truth from error. Rather, by looking at the Scriptures through the interpretive lens of the teaching of the Church, he will be led into the truth and unity Christ promised that the Spirit would bring.

The Problem of the Nature of Scripture As A Book

The Catholic understanding allows the Scriptures to exist in the role and with the authority that the Scriptures accord themselves. In the Catholic understanding, the Scriptures are the Church’s great treasure and to be highly valued, but not as a mere rule book or exhaustive source of truth. Again, going back to Acts 15, the Apostles themselves did not believe this. They cited the Scriptures in their deliberations at the Council of Jerusalem, but while they took counsel from the Scriptures, their decision was ultimately guided by the Holy Spirit. They did not come to their decision because the answer was “either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence [could] be deduced from Scripture.”²² Rather, they debated, prayed, and asked for guidance from the Holy Spirit. This guidance they received as promised and their decision was binding on all the faithful.

Over the course of the history of the Church there arose a plethora of pressing questions that the Scriptures do not address directly. With respect to such questions, the authority Christ gave to His Church, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, protects the Scriptures from being twisted to address a controversy they do not directly or indirectly address.

Hermeneutics

Having addressed our differences regarding the determination of the canon and authority and role of Sacred Scripture, I will also address our differences in the area of hermeneutics.

As with the authority issue, we have significant points of agreement on the principles we ought to employ in interpreting Sacred Scripture. We agree that Scripture cannot be rightly interpreted without the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Its depths cannot be mined if we treat it merely as a historical text. We agree that cultural context, authorial intent, literary mode, and other similar factors must be taken into account, unlike certain anti-intellectual segments of ‘just-me-and-my-Bible’ Christianity. We also agree, to a certain extent, that Scripture must be read in light of those who came before us and interpreted Scripture before us. But in Dei Verbum, Pope Paul VI makes clear the pivotal role played by Sacred Tradition and the teaching authority of the Church:

This tradition which comes from the Apostles develop in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke, 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received through Episcopal succession the sure gift of truth. For as the centuries succeed one another, the Church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her.

The words of the holy fathers witness to the presence of this living tradition, whose wealth is poured into the practice and life of the believing and praying Church. Through the same tradition the Church’s full canon of the sacred books is known, and the sacred writings themselves are more profoundly understood and unceasingly made active in her; and thus God, who spoke of old, uninterruptedly converses with the bride of His beloved Son; and the Holy Spirit, through whom the living voice of the Gospel resounds in the Church, and through her, in the world, leads unto all truth those who believe and makes the word of Christ dwell abundantly in them (see Col. 3:16).²³

But I believe the real point of disagreement is how we understand the Church’s authority in regard to how we read the Scriptures. The Catholic Church understands the Scripture’s primary place to be in the Church and interpreted by the Church, informed by her deepened understanding of Scripture throughout her history. Reformed Christians claim that they take the Church’s historical understanding of Scripture as an important factor in their reading of Sacred Scripture. Their respect for the early councils provides a basis for unity on certain fundamentals, especially on Trinitarian theology and Christology.

But if Protestants truly discerned the visible body of Christ, the Church, they would accept the later councils as well. As we have seen, the later councils were acting with the very same authority the Apostles and their brother presbyters and bishops acted with at the Council of Jerusalem, and those actions are the actions of the body of Christ. To love them is to embrace them and to seek to understand them, not to criticize them and act as their judge. Furthermore, to act as their judge is simply to draw a bullseye around the arrow one has already shot in the wall. If the councils agree with the Reformed understanding of Scripture, then they are accepted, but if not, they are deemed not to hold any authority whatsoever.

As Catholics, we accept these councils, and all subsequent Ecumenical Councils, as authoritative fundamentally because they are the words of our Holy Mother the Church to us. Our Reformed brethren generally accept the first four councils and some teachings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, but they accept them only because they have found them “biblical” according to their own interpretation of Scripture.

To be sure, all the dogmas of Mother Church are Biblical in the fullest sense of the word–there is no contradiction between any of the Councils and any teaching of Sacred Scripture. But we believe them not because we deem them Biblical according to our own interpretation of Scripture, but rather because we believe Jesus, whose Mystical Body the Church is. We believe the words of the Church because the words of the Mystical Body cannot come from anywhere but Christ the Head.

I am glad our Reformed brethren recognize the value and authority of the Fathers and the Church’s tradition in approaching Scripture; it gives us a significant basis for discussion and dialogue as we seek for unity. But for Reformed Christians, the words of Councils and Popes are not the reliable and trustworthy words of their Mother the Church and of Our Lord. Rather, they are a potentially helpful grab-bag whose contents must be treated with skepticism until one has determined whether or not they are in agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture.

This issue of hermeneutics is perhaps the most important epistemological obstacle between Protestants and Catholics, and the way to unity is blocked until we can find our way over it. If there is not one true Church to settle disputes and be the authoritative arbiter between heresy and orthodoxy, there can be nothing but the division and in-fighting that have plagued the last five hundred years of Christianity and which are not what our Lord and His Apostles intended when they implored Christians to unity. May we all come to love and humbly accept the words of Christ in the words of His Holy Church that we might all be one–not selectively, but completely.

1. Providentissimus Deus, sec. 20-21
2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 101.
3. Id., 104.
4. Westminster Confession of Faith, I.1.
5. A future article on Called to Communion will address “the Canon Question” in greater depth.
6. R.C. Sproul, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, 22-23.
7. Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.7.
8. I Timothy 3:14-15.
9. Ephesians 2:20.
10. 2 Thess. 2:15
11. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 86.
12. Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.7.
13. Dei Verbum, 8.
14. Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.7.
15. Westminster Confession of Faith, I.4.
16. II Timothy 3:15-17.
17. II Thessalonians 2:2.
18. Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3101.htm.
19. Westminster Confession of Faith, I.7.
20. Psalm 119:130.
21. A very helpful timeline charting the divisions within Presbyterianism can be found here: http://www.pragmatism.org/american/presbyterian_churches.jpg.
22. Westminster Confession of Faith, I.4.
23. Dei Verbum, Ch. 2

These bishops were ordained in the SSPX to serve the Traditional Latin Mass at a time when it seemed that rite might be dying out after the Second Vatican Council. The problem was that they were ordained without the approval of Rome, which incurred on Archbishop Lefebvre and the Bishops he was ordaining a latae sententiae excommunication. The SSPX remained Catholic and believes all Catholic dogma, but they were operating illicitly without Rome’s permission and thus had no official authority or standing in the Church.

But now, in a move toward reconciliation with the hundreds of thousands of Catholics in this awkward position, the Church has decided to lift the excommunications from these bishops. This does not regularize the SSPX, nor does it give these bishops any jurisdiction within the Church.

It merely makes them able to come to communion with the rest of the Church and opens the door to receiving the SSPX into full communion with the Catholic Church.

Of course, there was also the wrinkle of Bishop Williamson, one of the four bishops who only weeks before the Pope’s announcement was filmed making comments questioning the accepted number of, and methods by which, Jews were killed by Hitler during WWII.

This led a number of liberal Catholics, Jews and other groups to criticize the Pope’s action. In their opinion the Pope’s act of reaching out to what they perceive to be right-wing nut jobs was an insult to them. I believe there is more to it than that, and we’ll get into why below.

With that in mind, there are three issues I think are pertinent to the discussion between Reformed Protestants and Catholics that are made apparent by this move on Rome’s part.

The Church Has a Passionate Heart for Reunion

The Catholic Church loves all her separated children, just like any parent cares for their children who stray. As Pope John Paul II, may his memory be eternal, put it, the Church is “irrevocably committed” to the union of all Christians.

In like manner, Pope Benedict has chosen to go find the lost sheep of the SSPX even at the expense of losing favor in the minds of liberal Catholics, Jews and the secular world.

It should be noted, and is apparent in his letter linked above, that his heart was broken by this misapprehension of his intentions by the aforementioned groups. He longs for reconciliation with them just as fervently as he does with the SSPX.

His highest priority is the unification of the Church and he doesn’t care if he looks as crazy as a man scouring the wilderness trying to find a lost sheep. He must find his children and bring them back, and God help him, he will.

This hits home with our protestant brothers because this is a unique feature of the Catholic Church. As the history of the Presbyterian communions in America plainly attests, dividing is almost part of the essence of protestantism.

The Orthodox Presbyterians are not seeking to reunite with the Presbyterian Church of America, nor is there a reunion afoot between the Presbyterian Church of America and the Presbyterian Church USA. These divisions are almost a comfortable part of their identities.

But the Catholic Church cannot remain divided. It is a critical part of her mission to foster unity between all Christians. Reaching out to the SSPX is just one example of how the Church is unwilling that any Christians should remain separated, even if those Christians were in the wrong when they separated.

Similar efforts can be seen in the communication between Rome and the Orthodox in recent years, which have been very fruitful. Our last two Pope’s have also made great progress in understanding and entering into dialog with protestants. I know of no reformed denomination that is actively seeking to reunite with Rome in any serious fashion.

The Church Pursues a Practical and Humble Path to Reunion

The Catholic Church realizes that she must pursue the nearest and most expedient paths to reunion before attempting to bridge gaps that will take centuries to heal.

It is a very practical concern to heal divisions within the Catholic Church before we go trying to bring Christians who repudiate Rome’s authority into communion.

I believe the Pope chose to work for reunion with the SSPX because they are a low-lying fruit. They love the Catholic Church, its history and liturgy, its structure and its source.

They want to be Catholic, so it’s naturally easier to reconcile them than it is to reconcile groups that believe the Catholic Church to be heretical.

The fact that the Pope was willing to make this gesture even in light of the SSPX’s continued and recent criticisms of the post Vatican II Church and recent Popes reveals a striking degree of humility.

The SSPX was in the wrong from the beginning and is still wrong on some issues, but the Pope realizes that it is not the proud posturing of being “in the right”, but rather the spirit of humble fatherly love that will bring them back into full communion.

The Church has a Fundamental Concern for the Reformation of the Liturgy

The purpose of the SSPX from the beginning was the preservation of a reverent liturgy. It is no mistake that this Pope, who has such a love for true reverence and propriety in the Liturgy has held out the olive branch to a group whose whole existence rests in respect for these very issues.

In fact, one of the significant barriers to full communion was removed when Pope Benedict removed all restrictions on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass a few years ago.

Pope Benedict is seeking to bring the excesses committed in the name of the Second Vatican Council into balance. He has restored the practices of kneeling for Holy Communion and receiving on the tongue in his own liturgies and is making an example of what a reverent liturgy looks like in the way he celebrates Mass.

The pursuit of the SSPX clearly displays that this Pope is very concerned with restoring such reverent worship to the high place of honor where it belongs.

Again, this is of particular interest to our reformed brothers who do hold proper, reverent worship in very high regard.

I have spoken with many reformed folk who feel that, based on their experience of Catholic liturgy in the Novus Ordo Missae, their own community worships God more reverently and beautifully, so what interest would they have in becoming Catholic?

This is unfortunately often an apt criticism, but the state of liturgy in the Catholic Church in America is not historically how it has been, nor will it remain as it is now.

I hope our reformed brothers are compelled by the Pope’s concern for right worship and his efforts to promote it in the Catholic Church.

It is the fervent hope of all Catholics, and especially former protestants like the authors of Called to Communion, that one day we will be fully reunited with our protestant brothers. I pray that this small example of the Catholic Church’s heart for reconciliation among Christians will be the impetus for further growth in the unity of the Body of Christ.