Nuptial Mass at the Saint Louis Cathedral Basilica
(Photo courtesy of Jeff Geerling)

I. Is Defending the Legal Recognition of Marriage Imposing one’s Religion on Others?

Some people think that Christians should not propose or support legislation that legally defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman. Among the reasons they offer is the notion that religious people should not ‘impose’ their religious beliefs on people who do not hold those religious beliefs. We would not want others to impose their religious views on us, and therefore we should not do so to others. So, the objection bases itself on the Golden Rule.¹

It is true, of course, that we ought not coerce people to believe or practice our religion. That is a truth we know by natural law, that the dignity of the human person calls us to uphold the religious liberty of all persons, such that their freedom of will and self-determination are respected.² But our obligation not to impose our religious beliefs on others does not entail that we should not support civil legislation that upholds the traditional definition and institution of marriage.

That is because we can know both what marriage is, and what is right and wrong regarding marriage through the same natural law by which we know that our religious beliefs should not be imposed on others. (See the article by Sherif Girgis, Robert George, and Ryan Anderson, titled “What is Marriage?.”) Natural law is not based on or derived from divine revelation, and is therefore not based on religion. Our grasp of the natural law can be improved or diminished by the communities in which our moral understanding takes shape. And religion can illumine or distort our perception of the natural law in certain respects and to varying degrees. But even so, we know natural law through the rational capacity we have as human persons. So seeking to conform civil law to the natural law is not necessarily imposing religious beliefs on anyone, even if a truth belonging to the natural law is also believed and taught within one or more religions.

In addition, by reason we can know that marriage is a natural institution ordered to the common good, and upon which the common good depends essentially. The common good requires the formation of stable families intrinsically ordered to the procreation and rearing of children. The preservation of society requires a continual addition to its population, since each human person has only a finite lifespan. Without procreating couples, a society would cease to exist within a century. But for its perpetuation, society needs more than additional human beings; it needs these additional citizens to be educated, socialized, and formed in the virtues, such that upon reaching adulthood, they too can enter into marriage and other practices or crafts, and contribute to the preservation and improvement of society. A mere child factory or cloning factory could not do that, nor is that what children need in order to develop in a healthy, well-adjusted way.³ Only families are intrinsically suited to provide the formation and rearing children need to acquire the virtues and enter into society. Without the institution of the family, society would not only depopulate into extinction, but children would not be rightly prepared upon reaching adulthood to enter into marriage and other practices necessary for the flourishing of society. For this reason the common good of society depends vitally on the institution of the family, and therefore on marriage which is the family’s stabilizing bond by which it is intrinsically ordered to the procreation and rearing of children.

The legal recognition and defense of marriage helps protect and preserve a correct public understanding of and participation in the natural institution of marriage, because just law is a tutor in virtue to the citizens raised under and informed by that law in their actions and thus in the dispositions they develop.⁴ If the civil law were to treat other types of union as marriage as well, this would teach the citizens under that law that marriage is merely an arbitrary social contract between any number of persons of any sex — a concept of marriage presupposed by the ‘equality argument.’⁵ Such a law would obscure the truth about marriage as a natural institution, and would sanction and promote a culture of sexual behavior and dispositions contrary to that required to enter into and maintain the marriage institution as the essential foundation of the stable family. In this way the legal recognition of marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman protects and preserves not only marriage, but also the social practice of forming families naturally ordered to the procreation and rearing of children, by which our society is maintained. Conversely, legislation that defines marriage as something other than a union of one man and one woman is in this way harmful to the common good.⁶

In his 2004 pastoral letter titled “On Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good,” Archbishop Burke (now Cardinal Burke and Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura) wrote:

“Such legal recognition of a same-sex relationship undermines the truth about marriage, revealed in the natural law and the Holy Scriptures, namely that it is an exclusive and lifelong union of one man and one woman …. Likewise, the legal recognition of a homosexual relationship as marriage redounds to the grave harm of the individuals involved, for it sanctions and even encourages gravely immoral acts.”

And in 2003, as Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) published a document titled “Considerations Regarding Proposals to give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons,” in which he wrote:

“Laws in favour of homosexual unions are contrary to right reason because they confer legal guarantees, analogous to those granted to marriage, to unions between persons of the same sex. Given the values at stake in this question, the State could not grant legal standing to such unions without failing in its duty to promote and defend marriage as an institution essential to the common good.

It might be asked how a law can be contrary to the common good if it does not impose any particular kind of behaviour, but simply gives legal recognition to a de facto reality which does not seem to cause injustice to anyone. In this area, one needs first to reflect on the difference between homosexual behaviour as a private phenomenon and the same behaviour as a relationship in society, foreseen and approved by the law, to the point where it becomes one of the institutions in the legal structure. This second phenomenon is not only more serious, but also assumes a more wide-reaching and profound influence, and would result in changes to the entire organization of society, contrary to the common good. Civil laws are structuring principles of man’s life in society, for good or for ill. They “play a very important and sometimes decisive role in influencing patterns of thought and behaviour”. Lifestyles and the underlying presuppositions these express not only externally shape the life of society, but also tend to modify the younger generation’s perception and evaluation of forms of behaviour. Legal recognition of homosexual unions would obscure certain basic moral values and cause a devaluation of the institution of marriage.”

The State has an obligation under the natural law to defend the natural institution of marriage for the common good, just as the State has an obligation to defend innocent human life. Legally defining other sorts of union as ‘marriage’ would obscure the truth concerning marriage, and distort the public’s conception of marriage and the dispositions and behavior of its citizens in relation to marriage. In such a case, the State would be failing in its duty to defend marriage. When a State’s marriage laws fail to defend marriage, its laws are in that respect unjust, and citizens, whether Christian or not Christian, are right to seek to rectify the unjust laws.⁷

Cardinal Ratzinger in that same document explains that justice requires that the State defend and not distort marriage, writing:

Society owes its continued survival to the family, founded on marriage. The inevitable consequence of legal recognition of homosexual unions would be the redefinition of marriage, which would become, in its legal status, an institution devoid of essential reference to factors linked to heterosexuality; for example, procreation and raising children. If, from the legal standpoint, marriage between a man and a woman were to be considered just one possible form of marriage, the concept of marriage would undergo a radical transformation, with grave detriment to the common good. By putting homosexual unions on a legal plane analogous to that of marriage and the family, the State acts arbitrarily and in contradiction with its duties.

The principles of respect and non-discrimination cannot be invoked to support legal recognition of homosexual unions. Differentiating between persons or refusing social recognition or benefits is unacceptable only when it is contrary to justice. The denial of the social and legal status of marriage to forms of cohabitation that are not and cannot be marital is not opposed to justice; on the contrary, justice requires it.

Nor can the principle of the proper autonomy of the individual be reasonably invoked. It is one thing to maintain that individual citizens may freely engage in those activities that interest them and that this falls within the common civil right to freedom; it is something quite different to hold that activities which do not represent a significant or positive contribution to the development of the human person in society can receive specific and categorical legal recognition by the State. Not even in a remote analogous sense do homosexual unions fulfill the purpose for which marriage and family deserve specific categorical recognition. On the contrary, there are good reasons for holding that such unions are harmful to the proper development of human society, especially if their impact on society were to increase.⁸

My point in quoting from these Church documents is not to base the natural law argument on the Church, but to show that even the Church’s argument makes use of a natural law argument.

Pope Benedict XVI

Christian traditions in which morality is drawn exclusively from the Bible have very little recourse when and where the moral authority of the Bible or their particular interpretation of the Bible is not recognized in the public square. This is also why Protestantism is more vulnerable than is Catholicism to the objection that opposing same-sex ‘marriage’ legislation is imposing one’s religious beliefs on others. Calvin and Luther believed that depravity had so corrupted human reason that it is untrustworthy especially in ethics and philosophy. For their theological heirs, the practical consequence of that position is that we must rely on Scripture, not reason, both to determine and to ground morality. There is, of course, truth to our susceptibility as humans to rationalizing our unethical behavior, and using metaphysical assumptions we want to believe, in order to arrive at the philosophical and moral conclusions we want to be true. And there were Protestants who developed and contributed to our understanding of natural law — persons such as Hugo Grotius, Peter Vermigli and Francis Turretin. But Protestantism’s low view of reason, in combination with modern philosophy’s move toward positivism, tended to prevent any substantive or widespread Protestant reliance on or formal recognition of the natural law, and a development of and integration of natural law ethics within its theology. That was especially so in the nineteenth century, and culminated in the twentieth century with Karl Barth’s explicit rejection of natural law.⁹ And without a formal recognition of the natural law, a Christian’s opposition to same-sex ‘marriage’ can be based consciously only on Scripture, and he is therefore susceptible to the “religious imposition” objection.

II. Should Christians even seek to maintain or change public laws?

Similarly, some Christians claim that the efforts to protect the legal recognition of marriage or enact legal protections for the unborn, are an unhealthy or unjustified mix of religion and politics. Christianity, they claim, is about bringing people to the Kingdom of heaven, not about making this world a better place. The latter notion is associated with both theological liberalism and ‘liberation theology’ which replace the supernatural with the natural, and so remove from Christ’s gospel His invitation to the heavenly union which is eternal life in the divine family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and reduce the heavenly call to a summons to social and political transformation on earth. According to such Christians,

[T]the realm of nature should not be expected to function and look like the realm of grace. Living in the tension of two kingdoms we should stop trying to transform the culture of this world into the kingdom of our Lord and instead focus on the church being the church, led by it duly ordained officers and ministering through the ordinary means of grace. (Source)

What “the church being the church” means here is engaging and focusing on preaching, evangelism, sacraments, prayer, discipleship, etc. What this theological position intends to exclude, more than anything else, is the organized attempt by Christians or the Church to change laws or influence government policies, whether regarding marriage, abortion, war, capital punishment, etc. They express this typically as opposition to Christian engagement in ‘the culture war.’ In a post titled “How to win a culture war and lose a generation,” Rachel Held Evans recently proposed that Christians simply stop fighting the culture war, because, she claims, it is not working, and it is ‘turning off’ a generation of young people.

What ought we say to this? To be sure, from a Catholic point of view, those who seek to maintain the distinction between the Kingdom of heaven and any earthly political system are right that there is such a distinction, and that the denial of the supernatural is a grave error. The good news of Jesus Christ is a call to the beatific vision, a supernatural participation in the eternal life of the Blessed Trinity, not a man-made utopia accomplished by a Pelagian-style reversal of Babel. And we are built up in this eternal life through the liturgy of word and sacrament. And as Catholics we believe by divine revelation that Christ has elevated marriage to the dignity of a sacrament as I’ve written about in more detail elsewhere.

Yet this does not make marriage cease to remain a natural institution, much as baptism infuses into us the supernatural life of God, but does not make us cease to remain human. Marriage remains a natural institution to which humans are intrinsically ordered as beings who are by nature both rational and sexual. A fundamental Catholic principle is that grace perfects nature; grace does not abandon or destroy nature. Catholics are not Marcionites, Manicheans or gnostics. The God who created us is the same God who calls us to eternal life. The notion that salvation involves a spurning of nature or creation implies that the God who saves us is not the God who created us and all of nature. The falsehood of Marcionism is the reason underlying the truth of the Catholic principle that grace perfects nature. Redemption is not a second deity’s exit plan for man from the bungled mess brought about by an incompetent previous deity’s flawed design. In calling us to supernatural union with Himself, God does not call us to abandon our natural responsibilities to our family, our neighbors, and our society. The opposite error of a liberation theology that reduces the gospel to corporal works of mercy is a gnosticism that purportedly takes us ‘out’ of the world, and strips us of our civic obligations to build up the political society in which we live according to the natural law and the common good.

Cardinal Burke described our dual citizenship in this way:

Through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit into our lives, we have become citizens of Heaven, heirs to the eternal life which Christ has won for us by His Passion, Death and Resurrection. Citizens of Heaven, we remain citizens of Earth and of the particular nation in which we live. In fact, our heavenly citizenship requires our imitation of Christ who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

13. As citizens of both Heaven and Earth, we are bound by the moral law to act with respect for the rights of others and to promote the common good. The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council makes clear the responsibilities which are ours as citizens of the City of God and the city of man:

“The Council exhorts Christians, as citizens of both cities, to perform their duties faithfully in the spirit of the Gospel. It is a mistake to think that, because we have here no lasting city, but seek the city which is to come, we are entitled to shirk our earthly responsibilities; this is to forget that by our faith we are bound all the more to fulfill these responsibilities according to the vocation of each one. But it is no less mistaken to think that we may immerse ourselves in earthly activities as if these latter were utterly foreign to religion, and religion were nothing more than the fulfillment of acts of worship and the observance of a few moral obligations. One of the graver errors of our time is the dichotomy between the faith which many profess and the practice of their daily lives. As far back as the Old Testament the prophets vehemently denounced this scandal, and in the New Testament Christ Himself with greater force threatened it with severe punishment. Let there, then, be no such pernicious opposition between professional and social activity on the one hand and religious life on the other. The Christian who shirks his temporal duties shirks his duties towards his neighbor, neglects God Himself, and endangers his eternal salvation” (Gaudium et spes, No. 43a).

Our heavenly citizenship adds the grace of Christ to the duty of our earthly citizenship, which is to preserve, safeguard and foster the common good. As citizens of Heaven, we have the grace of the divine charity of the Good Samaritan to inspire and strengthen us in loving all, without boundaries.

14. The secularism of our culture, with its tendency to an exaggerated individualism, can easily cause confusion regarding the relationship of our duties as Christians and citizens, as citizens of Heaven and citizens of Earth. We can easily begin to view our Christian duty as a private matter without legitimate reference to our civic duty. The Word of Christ, however, calls us to the constant conversion of our lives, by which we overcome any selfish individualism and live truly in Christ for love of God and our neighbor, also in fulfilling our civic responsibility. (“Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good“)

Cardinal Burke

The duties and obligations we have as humans, to our families and to the common good of society, are retained, not lost or revoked when we become Christians. Among these duties are the promotion and preservation of the common good through the establishment of just laws. Our obligation to establish and uphold just laws in our society belongs to us even apart from Christianity, and is not removed by becoming Christian. Nor does becoming a Christian restrict the legitimate means by which we are to establish justice in society only to evangelism or individual conversion. Martin Luther King Jr., in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” explicitly appeals to natural law to argue that the Jim Crow laws must be changed. He did not think that becoming or being a Christian meant that we should no longer seek for our civil law to reflect and uphold the natural law. Otherwise, he would not have marched and protested against unjust civil laws. Similarly, William Wilberforce invested his whole life into a similar effort to establish laws against the grave injustice of slavery.

The gospel does not present us with an either/or regarding grace and nature, but a both/and. This is why becoming a Christian does not negate our responsibility as Christians to work to change unjust laws, whether they be about abortion, euthanasia, torture, racism, child sex trade, even laws that fail to give marriage its due protection, and are in that respect unjust. If abandoning the culture war means letting unjust laws or practices prevail, then calls to abandon the culture war are calls to cowardice, apathy, and indifference. That’s not what any generation needs. Our obligation not just as Christians, but first as human persons, to establish and defend social justice depends neither on our prospects for success, nor on the youth being enamored or ‘turned off’ by our efforts. It depends only on the goodness of justice, and the evil of injustice.

Some Christians acknowledge our obligation as individual Christians to establish and defend justice, but claim that the Church as such has no business in such matters. And it is true that the mission of the Church is not fundamentally directed toward a political or economic end, but instead to a supernatural end. The Second Vatican Council taught, “Christ, to be sure, gave His Church no proper mission in the political, economic or social order. The purpose which He set before her is a religious one.” (Gaudium et Spes, 42.) This, however, does not mean that the Church has nothing to say regarding political or social injustice, or that her mission which she received from Christ calls her to remain silent or disengaged in the face of social or political injustice. It means rather, as Pope John Paul II explains, that the Church has been given no technical competence or specific mission to promote some political or economic system over another, provided they each properly respect human dignity and uphold justice.¹⁰

From the Catholic perspective, the gospel handed down to us from Christ through His Apostles is not merely to man as individual, but also to man in his social dimension. The Church’s proclamation of repentance and conversion applies not only to individuals, but also to entire societies. In his 1991 Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II wrote:

The Church, in fact, has something to say about specific human situations, both individual and communal, national and international. She formulates a genuine doctrine for these situations, a corpus which enables her to analyze social realities, to make judgments about them and to indicate directions to be taken for the just resolution of the problems involved.

In Pope Leo XIII’s time such a concept of the Church’s right and duty was far from being commonly admitted. Indeed, a two-fold approach prevailed: one directed to this world and this life, to which faith ought to remain extraneous; the other directed towards a purely other-worldly salvation, which neither enlightens nor directs existence on earth. The Pope’s approach in publishing Rerum novarum gave the Church “citizenship status” as it were, amid the changing realities of public life, and this standing would be more fully confirmed later on. In effect, to teach and to spread her social doctrine pertains to the Church’s evangelizing mission and is an essential part of the Christian message, since this doctrine points out the direct consequences of that message in the life of society and situates daily work and struggles for justice in the context of bearing witness to Christ the Saviour. This doctrine is likewise a source of unity and peace in dealing with the conflicts which inevitably arise in social and economic life. Thus it is possible to meet these new situations without degrading the human person’s transcendent dignity, either in oneself or in one’s adversaries, and to direct those situations towards just solutions. (Centesimus Annus, 6)

The Church’s mission is neither entirely other-worldly, nor entirely directed to this world. Social justice is not the entirety of the gospel, but it is “an essential part of the Christian message,” because grace does not destroy nature, but preserves and perfects it. Repentance is a turning away from, and repudiation of injustice. In this way the call to justice, addressed both to individuals and societies, is an inseparable part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Just as the Church’s proclamation of the gospel calls individuals to repentance, so she calls nations to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24.) This justice to which the Church calls the nations includes the legal recognition and protection of the marriage institution.

Pope Benedict XVI (when still Cardinal Ratzinger), summarized the Church’s teaching on same-sex ‘marriage’ laws in this way:

The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions. The common good requires that laws recognize, promote and protect marriage as the basis of the family, the primary unit of society. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself. (“Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons,” 11)

We can and should reason together concerning the natural law argument’s implications regarding same-sex ‘marriage,’ and we should do so with respect and genuine charity for all the persons involved. To participate in that dialogue, we need to be able to listen and understand those with whom we disagree, and genuinely respect their dignity and personhood. For our part, that conversation needs to be marked by kindness, compassion, patience and sensitivity. Empathy helps us see that the desire for marriage among persons with same-sex attraction is a same-sex expression of the deep longing we all have as humans to love and be loved with lifelong commitment. In this way we start by recognizing and affirming common ground, and what we recognize in each other that is good and right. We are not merely seeking agreement with those who disagree with us, but civic friendship which includes sincere and mutual good will, even when we see little prospect for reaching agreement.¹¹

Here I have sought very briefly only to explain answers to two relevant questions: why opposition to same-sex ‘marriage’ legislation need not be the imposing of religious beliefs on others, and why Christians have an obligation to seek to establish and maintain just civil laws ordered to the common good of society, including laws protecting the natural institution of marriage. Such concern for justice is part of what it means for Christians to be the salt of the earth. Love is the fulfillment of the law, and Christ’s gospel of love therefore calls us to rectify social injustices, even within the civil law. The Catholic teaching is in this way a middle position between the error of liberation theology on the one hand, and the error of gnostic theology on the other.

1. See, for example, Fuller Theological Seminary Professor Daniel Kirk’s essay, “Regarding Amendment 1 in North Carolina.”
2. See the argument in Dignitatis Humanae.
3. A memorable example of such an attempt to eliminate the family institution is depicted in Huxley’s Brave New World.
4. Aristotle wrote, “Lawgivers make the citizens good by inculcating [good] habits in them, and this is the aim of every lawgiver; if he does not succeed in doing that, his legislation is a failure.” Nicomachean Ethics, 1103b2.
5. If marriage were a social construct, then we as a society would have the power to define it any way we wish. And in that case, since marriage has certain legal benefits under the civil law, it would be unjust to define marriage such that various classes of people are excluded from entering into marriage and so enjoying those benefits. But because marriage is a natural institution, and not a social construct, we cannot rightly define marriage just any way we wish, but only according to what it is. That is, because the natural institution of marriage is between one man and one woman, we cannot rightly define marriage as the union of two (or more) persons of the same sex, or the union of a human and an animal, or the union of a human and him or herself, or the union of a person with a fictional character, any more than we can define 2+2 as 5. For that reason, because marriage is a natural institution consisting of the union of one man and one woman, there is no discrimination or inequality on the part of citizens or civic leaders who, on that basis, refuse to modify civil laws so as to allow persons to ‘marry’ others of the same sex. The equality argument presupposes the ‘social construct’ conception of marriage, and in this way begs the question [i.e. presupposes precisely what is in question] in relation to those who believe that marriage is a natural institution.
6. A common question is whether polygamy is contrary to the natural law, since it was permitted and practiced among the Hebrews in the Old Testament. Polygamy does not frustrate the procreative end of marriage, but it does hinder a secondary end of marriage, which is the raising and social and moral training of those children. The self-giving nature of spousal love is complete, and therefore exclusive. For that reason, where one man has two or more wives (or one woman has two or more husbands), the resulting family structure is prone to discord and rupture, whereas the proper rearing of children requires an intrinsically stable family structure. However, because polygamy does not frustrate the procreative end of marriage, it is not absolutely contrary to the natural law regarding marriage. That is why it could, under certain circumstances, be divinely permitted in the Old Testament, as a step toward a more perfect understanding of marriage. Nevertheless, the marital institution by nature is a union of only one man with only one woman; this union is intrinsically ordered to the procreative end of marriage, and is naturally suited to fulfill the secondary function of marriage involving the raising and education of children. Jesus implies that marriage is monogamous when He answers a question about marriage by appealing to God’s original design constituted of one man and one woman. (cf. Matthew 19)
7. From the point of view of some of those supporting same-sex ‘marriage’ legislation, every person has a right to marry, and civil laws that recognize marriage as only possible between a man and a woman are unjust by failing to acknowledge that right in the case of persons seeking to marry other persons of the same sex. As explained in the footnote above, this argument presupposes the social construct notion of marriage. And if marriage were a social construct, then this argument would be cogent. But because marriage is a natural institution, it is as impossible for two persons of the same sex to marry, as it is impossible for a circle to be square and remain a circle. The very essence of marriage requires the union of persons of the opposite sex. In that case, there can be no right to marry a person of the same sex, because there can be no such thing as same-sex marriage, no matter what society may decide to call same-sex unions. So the argument for same-sex ‘marriage’ as a right is a question-begging argument, because it presupposes the social construct conception of marriage. The resolution of the disagreement, requires therefore a mutual examination of that more fundamental question.
8. “Considerations Regarding Proposals to give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons,” 8, emphases mine
9. There are some Protestants seeking to recover and reintegrate natural law with Protestant theology. See, for example, Stephen Grabill’s Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics, (Eerdmans, 2006).
10. See Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 41.
11. Opposition to a position does not justify violence against those who hold that position. That is true no matter which side of this issue one holds. In my opinion, resorting to violence is more often an indication that the person engaging in violence does not know how to present a rational defense for his position, and has abandoned rational discourse as a means of resolving disagreements.

I venture to say that many people would have been more likely to guess that an Evangelical preacher penned the above words rather than a Pope, let alone a Pope who ruled from 1914 – 1922, some forty years before the start of Vatican II. In fact, one caricature that we can safely put to rest is that the Church before Vatican II did not encourage the faithful to read the Bible. The simple fact is that in a fifty year period, three Popes wrote three significant encyclicals on Scripture. One used such descriptive language about the Bible as, “a Letter, written by our heavenly Father, and transmitted by the sacred writers to the human race in its pilgrimage so far from its heavenly country” (Providentissimus Deus #1). Another exhorted the faithful to, “read daily the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles, so as to gather thence food for their souls” (Spiritus Paraclitus #43). Still yet another reminded the faithful that the Scriptures were, “given by God . . . in order that these Divine Oracles might ‘instruct us to salvation, by the faith which is in Christ Jesus’ and ‘that the man of God may be perfect, furnished to every good work’” (Divino Afflante Spiritu #49).

So what is the point of mentioning caricatures, the Bible, and the Church? I shall offer two reasons: (1) easing the fears of those becoming attracted to the Catholic faith but who are concerned about the things told to them that Catholics are said to believe, especially about the Bible; and (2) explaining why becoming Catholic will deepen and vitalize your reading of the Bible.

First, the process of becoming Catholic can be downright frightening for the convert. It is quite typical for a convert to the Catholic Church to be surprised that they are moving toward Rome. Often times, the thought is, “any Church but that Church.” For the would-be Catholic, such practices as devotion to Mary and the Saints, the Sacraments, obedience to the Pope, and other “suspicious” beliefs and practices only but confirm in their minds their worst fears about Catholicism. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was right when he said, “There are not more than a hundred people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church. . . . As a matter of fact, if we Catholics believed all of the untruths and lies which were said against the Church, we probably would hate the Church a thousand times more than they do.” Thus, when dealing with the issues of conversion to Christ and His Church, many potential coverts are wrought with fear at best, and outright hatred at worst, at the mere thought of becoming Catholic. Add to the mix what spouses, parents, children, cousins, friends, fellow church members and mentors may think about such a move, and you have a recipe for paralysis by analysis. G.K. Chesterton observed, I think rightly, “It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it.” Those considering the claims of the Catholic Church have a vested interest in keeping their guard up against conversion to the Church.

This is why stories of those who come into the fullness of the Catholic faith never grow old for me. Many give up so much on the temporal level, from the fracturing and loss of family relationships, the sacrifice of professional esteem, and in many cases, added to that loss, is the forfeiting of employment and loss of income. While none of us should base our faith commitment on someone else’s conversion story alone, the fact is, conversion stories do have a place in helping us process our own journeys, not least of which is to help us ask the right questions. In just the last handful of years there have been many notable scholars who have entered the Church, such as Bruce Marshall, Rusty Reno, J. Budziszewski, Douglas Farrow, Reinhard Hutter, Frank Beckwith, and Mary Moorman, to name just a few. And over the past decades, the list includes such luminous figures as Dr. Scott Hahn, Dr. John Bergsma, Dr. Kenneth Howell, Dr. Peter Kreeft, Dr. Robert Louis Wilken, the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, Father Richard John Neuhaus, and Father Louis Bouyer. The list could go on.

Now some might say: “What of Catholics becoming Protestants?” Certainly many Catholics leave the Church and become Protestant but what I want you to consider is that in many cases the Protestant convert to Catholicism risks more than the Catholic leaving the Church when you look at it from the temporal realm alone. Take clergy converts, for starters. If a Protestant clergyman leaves his communion, he loses his employment, in many cases also his home (because in some pastoral calls a house is provided), his family, if his wife and children are not on board, professional disapproval and loss of friendships. He also does not have any guarantee that moving forward will mean that he would get to do what he loves, teach the faith. In the tragic case of a Catholic priest leaving the Church, consider what is not lost on the temporal level. Typically the Catholic priest adds a wife, he adds income which is not too difficult because the average diocesan priest does not exactly make a lot of money, he can be more discriminating in accepting a job because he will usually not have the income demands of a Protestant cleric, who needs to provide for his family, and you can add that he also gains the ‘freedom’ to travel and go where he wants, no longer tied to a diocese. In fact, when you compare the converts most well trained in theology in both Protestantism and Catholicism, it is the Protestant who is more likely to convert. A priest, a close friend of mine, put it this way, “The best prospects out there to become Catholic are Protestants who take their faith very seriously. They want to know the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of faith and if they continue to be open to a deepened faith, they will begin, at some point to ask the right questions. Before people can ever get the right answers, they must first learn to ask the right questions. Committed Protestants are often closer to the truth of the Catholic faith than many Catholics. That is why they add such vitality when they join the Church established by Jesus Christ.”

For those who are considering the Catholic faith, ask yourself this: Are all these scholars, pastors, and teachers deceived? Why would such converts give up, in so many cases, the comforts of family, employment, and friends? In other words, from a temporal, this-world-only perspective, they lose, and in many cases, they will never make up what they lost. It is possible that they are wrong but at the very least, this “counting of the cost” corresponds with what Jesus Christ demands of His disciples (Luke 14:28).

As for the reverse of Catholics leaving the Church for Protestantism, often, though not always, to be fair, it is the poorly catechized Catholic who grew up in a home where the faith was not central to life, or in other cases, a marital impediment (divorce, remarriage etc…) is the reason for leaving. Rarely does the Catholic leave the Church because he has discovered in his studies that the Church is wrong about contraception or that the early Church did not believe that the ministry of Peter is the visible sign of unity in the Church. In fact, those questions do not ordinarily arise in the minds of most people, let alone Catholics. Usually a Catholic leaves the Church because his Catholic upbringing was mostly nominal, therefore, it did not resonate with his lived experience. The extent of his knowledge of the faith usually did not exceed that of an adolescent because for many Catholics, tragically, the sacrament of Confirmation is understood as a graduation from Church and not an entering into a deeper commitment to Christ and the Church.

To those considering the Catholic faith, I encourage you to continue down that path. You should count the cost, and you should continue to study. If the Catholic faith is the true faith, you should not be afraid to continue seeking. What is there to fear? It may be hard, and it will be. It may cause great stress, no doubt. It may make you feel overwhelmed, to be sure. But what is there to fear in searching out and knowing the truth? Jesus commands us not to fear (Matthew 10:24-33). In his introduction to the world’s stage, Blessed Pope John Paul II offered hope to a worried world with the words, “Do not be afraid.” Why should we not be afraid? Because Christ has overcome the world. St. Basil the Great offers us wise insight on putting things in their heavenly and eternal perspective:

If you take away my possessions, you will not enrich yourself, nor will you make me a pauper. You have no need of my old worn-out clothing, nor of my few books, of which the entirety of my wealth is comprised. Exile means nothing to me, since I am bound to no particular place. This place in which I now dwell is not mine, and any place you send me shall be mine. Better to say: every place is God’s. Where would I be neither a stranger and sojourner? Who can torture me? I am so weak, that the very first blow would render me insensible. Death would be a kindness to me, for it will bring me all the sooner to God, for Whom I live and labor, and to Whom I hasten.

That being said, I want to stress that becoming Catholic is not only about what you are giving up. Becoming Catholic is also about what you are gaining. This leads to my second point about Bible reading. I can say that becoming Catholic has enriched my reading of the Bible, not lessened it — renewed it, and not stunted it. I suspect that this is surprising for some. Why would becoming Catholic lead to a more substantial engagement with the Sacred Text? The reason for this is the Magisterium, the very authority that many claim makes reading the Bible superfluous for Catholics. Quite a few Evangelicals believe that the Magisterium provides all the answers for the Catholic, and as a result, Catholics have no need to read the Bible or can gain very little from such reading. The former Cardinal Ratzinger is quite helpful in explaining what it means to be obedient to the Magisterium:

The Magisterium, as representative of the universal Church, can claim the respect, indeed the obedience of the preacher . . . the presumption of correctness, so to speak, is in favor of the Magisterium. That does not mean that the Christian conscience has been disengaged, it can very well come to the judgment that this directive or that declaration does not really represent the universal Church. Accordingly, it is true that the weight of the Magisterial statements corresponds to the degree of the universality . . . the limit of obedience to the Magisterium, which does in fact exist . . . does not mean that someone can in principle appoint himself judge over the Magisterium: it should cost something before one thinks he may decide otherwise (Dogma and Preaching, p. 35).

Leaving aside the fact that the Magisterium does not “provide all the answers for a Catholic,” and does not demand that a Catholic disengage his conscience as the current Pope pointed out, how does the Magisterium help deepen one’s Bible reading? I can answer simply that the Magisterium provides the Catholic interpreter with the guidance and direction necessary to explore the Bible by its proposal that the Bible is to be read in both its literal and spiritual senses, of which there are three spiritual senses: allegorical/typological, moral and anagogical (CCC paras. 116-117). The Magisterium also directs us to read the Bible in light of the following three-fold criteria: being attentive to the content and unity of the entire Scripture, reading the Bible within the living Tradition of the whole Church, and being attentive to the analogy of the faith (CCC paras. 112-114). This direction frees the Catholic to navigate the riches of the biblical story as an individual but not in isolation. Rather, because the Catholic does not have to determine what the faith is, deciding what is or is not “biblical,” he has a foundation on which to build when reading Scripture. If I may offer a helpful illustration: Parents will tell their children where they can and cannot go when playing in the yard. They might want to build a fence to keep their children safe. This fence, while setting limits, actually provides the children a safer environment in which to play and explore. Who would think that these parents were limiting the freedom of their children? The same goes for the relationship between law and freedom. Law, in its proper use, is a gift given by God not to restrict freedom but to allow human freedom to flourish. In fact, this illustration is not merely a hypothetical. It is what we experience in contemporary society. Many people assume that the law is an imposition on freedom. The average person thinks freedom is the ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want. True freedom, however, is freedom for moral excellence. The Magisterium functions in some sense like the fence in the backyard or the proper use of law in society, providing the fertile ground that allows biblical studies to flower.

Non-Catholic exegetes often argue over what is the best method of biblical interpretation. Some advocate the grammatical and historical method. This method seeks to get at the grammar of a text and its historical background in order to derive the right interpretation. There certainly is truth in this method, but if this view is the exclusive method, the biblical text risks being reduced to a history lesson, an event of the past disconnected from the present. The redemptive and historical approach is another method that is praiseworthy. The exegete aims to understand how the text reveals the redemptive action of God in the story. Thus, the story of David and Goliath is not about overcoming the Goliaths in your life, as one Reformed writer is prone to remind us, but about how God, through David, defeated Israel’s enemies. This method, if left unchecked, tends to push to the side the moral lesson that the text provides.

However, as in many things, the Catholic is not faced with an “either/or” dilemma. Instead, the Catholic exegete is able to glean many different meanings from the same passage or story. For example, to continue with the David and Goliath story, he can and should look at the historical context of the story. He then should go on to explain how in this story God is acting through David to defeat Israel’s enemies, the Philistines, through their representative Goliath. The exegete does not have to stop there, because he could see in this story a type of what is to come, namely, Jesus Christ’s defeat of Satan. And most certainly, the story has a moral message, encouraging the believer not to fear whatever circumstance that comes his way because Christ has overcome and He has given us and continues to give us the graces necessary to overcome any obstacle.

The Magisterium provides the guidance that prevents the interpreter from either focusing exclusively on the literal sense, or from over-spiritualizing everything. The story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-39 gives us a glimpse of the necessity of guidance in understanding the meaning of the Scripture. The eunuch was reading from the prophet Isaiah when Philip came upon him. Philip asked him if he understood what he was reading, to which the eunuch replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” The eunuch asked Philip if the prophet Isaiah was referring to himself or someone else. Philip then told him about Jesus. The story informs us of the necessity of guidance when reading Scripture. It also demonstrates the need for a spiritual and typological hermeneutic. If Philip only had recourse to the literal, then how could he help guide the eunuch to understand that this story was pointing to Christ? In fact, it was typology that empowered the early Church to fight against the gnostics, on the one hand, who denied the legitimacy of the Old Testament story, and to make the case to the Jews, on the other hand, demonstrating that the Church’s message was truly Israel’s message now fulfilled in the Person of her Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. Typology, guided by the Magisterium, also connects the Ark of the Covenant with Mary, especially in the travel narratives in 2nd Samuel 6 and Luke 1, the Royal Steward of Isaiah 22 with the promise to Peter in Matthew 16, the Twelve tribes of Israel with Twelve Apostles, and the people of Israel with the Church (1st Peter 2).

In closing, we began talking about the fears that come upon us when it dawns on us that we find ourselves moving toward full communion with the Catholic Church. Those fears are normal and are to be expected. However, those fears must not paralyze us from moving forward. You should continue down the path of study that you have begun. You might consider acquiring some excellent books that demonstrate the depth and riches of Catholic biblical interpretation. I recommend that you look at Brant Pitre’s Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper and Hail, Holy, Queen, Father Aidan Nichols’ Lovely Like Jerusalem or John Bergsma’s Bible Basics for Catholics: A New Picture of Salvation History to help you get started. While the Catholic is to have a deep reverence and respect for the Scripture, and is to take seriously its warning about twisting Scripture (2nd Peter 3:16), hopefully you have come to see that the Catholic has no reason to fear Scripture. Instead, Scripture’s proper home is the Church, and in particular, the Sacred Liturgy. Listen well to the words of Jesus Christ, who tells us, not to fear. How can we fear the Church, when it is His Body?

Gerard Manley Hopkins

“TRUMPERY, MUMMERY, AND G.M. HOPKINS FLUMMERY? …REMOVED TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WAY” So Gerard Manley Hopkins laughingly writes to his concerned friend Robert Bridges in 1866. Knowing that his impending conversion to the Catholic faith will damage his position at Oxford and change his life forever, laughter is all Hopkins can manage. Not that he is insincere. Rather, his studied unseriousness is a learned reaction from John Henry Newman, who upon hearing of the difficulties Hopkins is about to get himself into, can only laugh and remark that, indeed, there is “no way out” of coming to the Church. We would do better to interpret the laughter as intense, pure happiness. Hopkins himself remarks on this point over and over again. After having felt as an exile and as “a penitent waiting for admission to the Catholic Church” for a good long while, he has finally made up his mind. Consequently, the cares of the world have slipped entirely away.

Even post-Tractarian Oxford was not a hospitable place for a convert. In fact, Hopkins is ruining his life. Such are the words that his father uses to describe the situation. Here is his eldest son, who after a spotless course at Oxford, is preparing to leave it all behind for what appears to be a passing fancy, a youthful attraction. In hindsight, we know that Hopkins’s conversion comes from a far deeper place. His love for the Catholic Church never wavers. Indeed, his career prospects disappear and he, like all other Catholics, is banned from government posts. He never advances far in the Catholic Church as a priest. He never feels comfortable in his role as a pastor. The Society of Jesus, of which he becomes a member, never finds him entirely satisfactory. He ends his life in Ireland as a college teacher; at that time hardly considered a successful conclusion. Certainly Hopkins himself feels the strain of being sent away, as he writes in To Seem the Stranger, “I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third / remove.” The enjambment of the word “remove” emphasizing the physicality of his estrangement is a nice touch from the poetic genius who was read and appreciated by exactly two people at the time of his death. And yet, his last words as he lies dying at a young age are “I am so happy. I am so happy.”

What is it that compels this bright young Oxford man, impels him inexorably onward to the Catholic Church? How is it that the obstacles imagined and the failures experienced never shake his happiness?

There is a simple answer:

Beauty.

Hopkins is a man who recklessly and relentlessly searches for beauty. Those around him, perhaps, look at his thirst for beauty as an aesthete’s dandyish affectation, hardly a matter to ruin one’s life over. But for Hopkins, beauty is a far more serious matter. It is not a passing fancy. It is not an effete gloss on the surface of deeper, serious thoughts. To him, beauty is immortal; the sparkling diamond of the divine by which all other things are made to shine. His father notices the attitude, admitting that he has noticed his son’s “growing love for high ritual.” His father, however, understands this to be mere attraction to the liturgy itself. In reply, Hopkins sets the matter straight by noting that the Tractarian movement has had its effect; when it comes to surface aesthetics, the Anglican Church wins hands down over the Romans. This, however, is not what compels him. Instead he notes that Catholicism is meant “to be loved — its consolations, its marvelous ideal of holiness, the faith and devotion of its children, its multiplicity, its array of saints and martyrs, its consistency and unity, its glowing prayers, the daring majesty of its claims.” These are not the words of a mere enthusiast attracted to smells and bells. These are the words of a man who has recognized true beauty. It is this which compels him onward.

In the poem Duns Scotus’s Oxford, Hopkins writes,

this air I gather and I release
he lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits
to peace;

The allusion in the poem is first and foremost to the man who was a great promoter of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the man who “fired France for Mary without spot.” Beyond this specifically we find brought together two formative influences on Hopkins: there is Oxford with her “coped and poised powers” and there is Duns Scotus and his metaphysics.

To understand what is so compelling about beauty, we must start at Oxford. It is here that Hopkins first develops a particular sensitivity to beauty. He becomes a disciple of Ruskin while at Oxford, at least partially through the influence of the artist Walter Pater. Ruskin teaches that beauty is found in close attention to every particular of a thing, trying to get at the essence of it. He holds that if an artist can paint a leaf, he can paint the world. The role of the artist is to describe his subject in accurate detail. As the inner form, or the inscape (a Hopkins neologism), of the subject comes out, the artist beholds the divine and is beheld by the divine. There is a sort of communion here that ties the perceived and the perceiver together.

In Wreck of the Deutschland we see how a few years after conversion Hopkins explicitly connects beauty to the theological. Through finding the instress of a tempestuous sky he finds that he meets God.

I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand

Hopkins might not always recognize exactly how the beauty of Christ is present in the world, but theologically he knows that if anything is beautiful it is so by the mystery of God’s presence. The world is God-shaped; fathered forth by “the one whose beauty is past change.”

In addition to Ruskin, there is Duns Scotus. Hopkins is a close reader of Scotus already at Oxford and the influence is easy to recognize in his theory of intuitive cognition, which says that our instincts often point to the truth even if we can’t explain why or how. The beauty of poetry, for instance, is located in that realm of intuition. This is reflected in language, which Hopkins employs by taking apart. His poems aren’t just a string of affected metaphors. Rather, they are an attempt at using language in such a way that it is almost musical, or pre-cognitive. It is word placed in the unique context of Jesus Christ the Word. He is trying to find that precognitive moment, the inscape of the thing, and by so doing he is locating an inexpressible beauty and giving it back to God as worship. Hopkins affectingly writes in a minor poem, “give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.” Beauty shows us truth and the truth is Jesus.

Thus, after his conversion, Hopkins’s conception of beauty finds a natural development in the thought of St. Ignatius of Loyola. I would argue that the Society of Jesus never was a good fit for Hopkins temperamentally or professionally. He takes vows anyway, drawn in by the tender heart of St. Ignatius whose theme on the practice of the presence of Christ must have been irresistible to a man such as Hopkins.

For instance, notice how the Incarnational worldview of St. Ignatius comes through in The Windhover.

To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

The poet is awestruck. At the moment of the bird’s beauty, the bird becomes more than itself and is revealed in its Christed nature. It stirs his heart. Even below in the plowed fields there shines in the dirt a gold-vermillion through a seemingly ordinary nature. In other words, the Incarnationalism is so strong that for Hopkins, he is not just being pointed to Christ, but the flight of the falcon or the overturned dirt in that moment is actually mediating Christ. In the impossible to define world of the poetic, we are somewhere between a metaphor and sacrament. Compare this with St. Ignatius, who writes, “I will consider how God dwells in creatures, in the elements…” Hopkins further points us in this direction when, later in his life, he writes that “my life is determined by the Incarnation down to most of the details of the day.”

We’ve just read through a number of sources that show the development of Hopkins on beauty as his life progresses. We should take careful note of the fact that his early aestheticism as learned at Oxford is not channeled into service of the Church of England’s undoubtedly gorgeous liturgy as an Anglican priest. This is a future that he actively rejects. No, Hopkins’s conception of beauty runs much deeper than an appealing veneer. We can trace the maturation of his thought as his poetry develops. He is not a romantic. Rather, his poetry is unprocessed, wild, and primeval. It is focused not on feelings or individuality, but on wording Christ. The kenosis of the Son into matter is the heart of all beauty and it is only in Christ that beauty is to be found and it is to Christ that beauty leads.

Now we can circle back again and reexamine the conversion to Catholicism. We have an idea of how Hopkins is thinking about beauty, the seed of his thought, so we can ask another question. What beauty does the Catholic faith have that Hopkins denies to the Church of England?

Simple:

The Real Presence.

In The Half-way House, he writes:

My national old Egyptian reed gave way:
I took of vine a cross-barred rod or rood.
Then next I hungered: Love when here, they say,
Or once or never took Love’s proper food;

But I must yield the chase, or rest and eat.-
Peace and food cheered me where four rough ways meet.

The “national old Egyptian reed” is a reference to the Church of England, which he finds giving way as he stands at a crossroads. At the intersection he finds life is suffering and life is pain. He is slowly starving for want of proper food. Life is either meaningless agony or it is the redemption of the Cross. Having examined his old faith, Hopkins finds that it lacks the one thing he needs. It has beautiful worship but it lacks Beauty. Beauty is only found in the Real Presence of Christ immolated on the altar; true food for the hungry.

The Eucharist is Hopkins’s answer to “Why Catholicism?” It is also his answer to “Where Beauty?” Both are perfected by the “better beauty,/ grace.”

In retrospect, I suppose that it is difficult for one as enamored of beauty as Hopkins to be a member of any Church that does not offer the sacramental grace of the Real Presence. This, after all, is the most beautiful expression of God’s nature that there can possibly be. Of course, all Christians are at least to a minimal degree supportive of the fact of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. Because of this, we Catholics and Orthodox would be uncharitable to deny beauty present in the lives of other churches. There is a hidden lack at the center of it, though, that we cannot deny. It is this lack that Hopkins noticed which produced his conversion. In the Catholic Church, we understand that in the Real Presence, Christ is present Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.

Michael Rennier

I suspect that for many of our separated brethren, only the last formulation would hold true in their conception. The Communion is symbolic and in one way or another makes present the spiritual Christ. This is true enough insofar as it goes; Christ is of course Divine, fully God. But if we really, truly believe that he assumed humanity, we also must affirm that the Real Presence includes his Body, Blood, and Soul. Once becoming one with us, Christ does not willingly relinquish his role as head of our family. He remains united with us until all things are made new. A God who is any less is not enough. It seems quite clear that Hopkins is correct in his logic that a God who having once become Incarnate, has now withdrawn to Heaven and now manifests himself only spiritually, is a God who has somehow withdrawn the concept of Beauty from the human experience. So it has to be the Real Presence or nothing. This Incarnate Christ, as Hopkins recognized, is the only true food. It is this beautiful food which brought him eternal happiness.

How could anyone help but to be happy when we finally understand:

I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

On Good Friday, Jesus told the Good Thief crucified alongside him that “today you will be with me in paradise,” according to Luke’s Gospel. “That’s the only clue we have as to what Jesus was doing between death and resurrection,” John Piper, a prominent evangelical author and pastor from Minnesota, has said. “I don’t think the thief went to hell and that hell is called paradise.”

Wayne Grudem, a former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, says the confusion and arguments could be ended by correcting the Apostles’ Creed “once and for all” and excising the line about the descent.

“The single argument in its favor seems to be that it has been around so long,” Grudem, a professor at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona, writes in his “Systematic Theology,” a popular textbook in evangelical colleges. “But an old mistake is still a mistake.”

Grudem, like Piper, has said that he skips the phrase about Jesus’ descent when reciting the Apostles’ Creed. (source)

Descent of Christ to Limbo (1365-68)
Andrea da Firenze
Cappella Spagnuolo, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Not surprisingly, both men derive from the Anabaptistic tradition which has historically been opposed to Creeds in the first place. Essentially, this terrible error is the fruit of heretical Christology. Let me explain.

There are potentially a number of errors here. One is that Christ Himself did not have a human soul. Many Protestants, without knowing it, do not believe that Christ has a human soul. They instead believe that Christ has a human body but that His deity serves as the animating principle of His body. Hence, when Christ died, His deity was naturally in Heaven. The conclusion is that He would have skipped Hell entirely.

On the other end of the spectrum is the heretical doctrine of Calvin that states that Christ literally descended into the Gehenna of the damned in order to receive the full punishment of sin. This is contrary to Scripture, contrary to the Fathers, and contrary to orthodox Christology. {Read: Calvin’s Worst Heresy: That Christ Suffered in Hell}.

Another problem with Piper and Grudem’s teaching is that it does not appreciate the historic doctrine of the Beatific Vision. Christianity teaches that the blessed receive the Beatific Vision in Heaven and that this consists in the blessed soul seeing the Divine Essence of God. Catholicism teaches that Christ always experienced the Beatific Vision – even in the womb of His Immaculate Mother. In this sense, Christ was always experiencing Heaven…even on the cross. In the higher part of His soul, He always enjoyed the Beatific Vision; however, in the lower parts of His human soul, He experienced sorrows and agony.

By positing the proper relationship in Christ with regard to His body, blood, soul, and divinity, we come to see that the Apostles’ Creed is entirely correct. Christ descended into Hell to deliver the Old Testament saints from Abraham’s Bosom, or as it is called in Catholic theology, the Limbo of the Fathers.

According to Thomas Aquinas, Hell consists of four abodes:

1. Limbo of the Fathers or Abraham’s Bosom (a subterranean paradise)
2. Limbo of the Children (a subterranean paradise for uncircumcised/unbaptized children)
3. Purgatory (for those needing further sanctification)
4. Gehenna (eternal and fiery torments of the damned)

Christ descended in order to deliver souls from Abraham’s Bosom and to announced His victory over the reprobates in Gehenna. The other day at my blog Canterbury Tales I posted 8 Bible Verses on the Descent into Hell. Here they are:

1. Saint Paul teaches us in Ephesians 4:9 that Christ our Lord descended into Hell after He offered His life on the cross. ”Now that He ascended, what is it, but because He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?” Note here that Hell is described as having “parts,” that is the four parts of Hell.
2. Saint Peter preached in Acts 2:24 that “God hath raised up Christ, having loosed the sorrows of hell, as it was impossible that He should be holden by it.” Christ loosed the Old Testament saints from hell.
3. Saint Peter also wrote in 1 Peter 3:19 that “Christ coming in spirit preached to those spirits that were in prison, which had some time been incredulous.” On this verse, Saint Athanasius says that “Christ’s body was laid in the sepulchre when He went to preach to those spirits who were in bondage, as Peter said.” (Ep. ad Epict.)
4. The prophet Hosea foretold the descent of Christ into Hell in Hosea 13:14 by placing these words into the mouth of the Messiah: “O death, I will be thy death; O hell, I will be thy bite.”
5. Zechariah foretells the redemption of those in the Limbo of the Fathers in Zech 9:11: “Thou also by the blood of Thy Testament hast sent forth Thy prisoners out of the pit.” What could this mean except that the Messiah would free people from the underworld?
6. Colossians 2:15: “Despoiling the principalities and powers, He hath exposed them confidently.” This refers to Christ’s victory over the condemned angels who are the demons of Hell.
7. Psalm 23:7: “Lift up your gates, O ye princes,” which the medieval Gloss interprets: “that is–Ye princes of hell, take away your power, whereby hitherto you held men fast in hell”.
8. In Ecclesiasticus 24:45, Siracides prophesied concerning Christ: “I will penetrate to all the lower parts of the earth.”

How then do we respond to John Piper? He’s simply not biblical. He fundamentally does not understand what Christ means by “paradise” and its relationship in the Jewish mind to Sheol or the Underworld. In my book The Crucified Rabbi – Judaism and the Origins of Catholic Christianity, I dedicate an entire chapter to this topic. Chapter 13 is titled Jewish Afterlife and Catholic Afterlife. It focuses on the Jewish traditions of the afterlife and how Catholicism incorporated these ancient and correct doctrines. The reader learns why Orthodox Jews still pray for the dead. Why do Catholics and Jews pray for the dead? They share the same worldview! This is all news to Protestants who lack knowledge of Second Temple Judaism and Church History.

If I were able to dialogue directly with John Piper, I would challenge him directly on this point. Why does a first century book like Enoch (quoted in the New Testament) depict Sheol or Hades in a way that conforms to Catholic theology, but is in open contradiction to Piper’s Baptist theology? Why is it that Catholicism has continuity with the Judaism of Jesus Christ, but Anabaptistic theology has no continuity whatsoever-either theologically or chronologically?

To be truly Jewish is to be truly Catholic.

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

Taylor R. Marshall, Ph.D.

PS: It is Catholic tradition that the 12 Apostles wrote the Apostles Creed. There are 12 lines in the Apostles Creed and each Apostle contributed a line. It was Saint Philip, according to pious tradition who added “He descended into Hell.”

Hunt’s thesis that heresy and schism are part and parcel of Christian identity is based upon the historical record of Christian division. Working backwards, we find Protestants divided from Protestants, Protestants divided from Catholics, and Orthodox divided from Catholics. Surprisingly, however, Hunt includes even the original Church (which for the sake of argument he grants is the Catholic Church) within the pale of heresy:

You see, when the Christian faith began it wasn’t a separate faith from Judaism. For the first followers of Jesus, and no doubt for Jesus himself, Christianity (or more precisely “the Way”) was the fulfillment of God’s promises to the people of Israel. Jesus was a Jew. His disciples were (mostly) Jews. Christianity, in its infancy, was simply a branch of Judaism which believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah.

Of course, we all know from history that this marriage didn’t last long. After the first Christians had been expelled from their synagogues one too many times for being “dissenters of the established (Jewish) religious dogma,” they eventually broke away to form what we now call the Church.

Which means, therefore, that every single person who has every [sic] worn the mantle of “Christian” is, by definition, a heretic.

There are several layers of confusion in this analysis. For one thing, Hunt wrongly conflates schism with heresy, such that a schismatic person or group is by definition heretical. Secondly, it is not the case that the Church was formed in response to the first Christians being expelled from the Jewish synagogues. Christ first established his Church, with distinct government, rites, and doctrines, gave her the Holy Spirit, and then the leaders and other members of the Church were rejected by Israel (that is, Israel “according to the flesh”), even as Israel had rejected her Christ while he was on earth. But neither Christ nor his mystical Body were heretics, nor were they schismatics. Christ was and is the Davidic King of Israel, and the Church was and is the present manifestation of the kingdom, which is particularly made evident in the celebration of the Eucharist (cf. Luke 22:14-30).

The Church was not originally constituted by the principles of schism and heresy, but rather by the principles of unity and truth. Those who would be united to Christ in the Church that he founded cannot therefore be content to be a heretic among many heretics, nor a member of a schism among many schisms.

A third problem with Hunt’s analysis is that he uses the word “heresy” in a purely horizontal sense, as something that merely stigmatizes an ecclesial community in the eyes of other such communities. He overlooks or ignores the relation between heresy and falsehood. Even though schism is not to be conflated with heresy, it is true that schisms often seek to justify themselves by the adoption of some heresy, or are formed due to the perception of heresy in the Church at large, or in a denomination, or in a particular congregation. In these cases, attribution of “heresy” is not simply a rhetorical device by which to stigmatize the other in relation to oneself. It is a declaration that an individual or ecclesial body has denied that which has been revealed by God. And the point of affirming (and not denying) truth that has been divinely revealed is not to distinguish oneself from one’s fellows, but to know God.

Only by defining “heresy” in purely relative and horizontal terms is Hunt able to dismiss the attribution as insignificant:

So what does all of this mean?

For starters, it means that if someone ever calls you a heretic, you can look them in the eye with confidence and say, “You’re right, I am a heretic. And so are you.”

More importantly, this brief history lesson should remind us that in our zeal to “defend the faith” we should remember that the faith is not always as black and white as we may have come to believe. Furthermore, we should remember that the Christian faith is full of disagreement. It’s full of people who were at first labeled heretics, but who, over time, came to be regarded as great heroes of the faith.

The effect of Hunt’s post is to call into question the absolute nature of doctrinal truth claims, or else to advance a skeptical position with reference to the question “Which is the true doctrine?” The key assumption behind the entire piece is that there is no living authority on earth whose interpretation of the Bible (i.e., doctrine) is binding upon everyone, as being specially protected from error. Thus, the situation is simply that Christians do not all agree in matters of doctrine, and in all probability no one’s doctrine is entirely right (no individual or community being especially protected from error). Ergo, we are all heretics.

By contrast to Hunt’s horizontal definition of heresy, the Catholic Encyclopedia defines “heresy” in relation not only to various groups of Christians, but to doctrinal truth. Of course, it is readily apparent that the definition in this article presupposes that there is a vital connection between one body of Christians, referred to as “the Church,” and the authentic exposition of the doctrinal content of the Bible, the denial of which constitutes heresy:

St. Thomas (II-II:11:1) defines heresy: “a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas”. “The right Christian faith consists in giving one’s voluntary assent to Christ in all that truly belongs to His teaching. There are, therefore, two ways of deviating from Christianity: the one by refusing to believe in Christ Himself, which is the way of infidelity, common to Pagans and Jews; the other by restricting belief to certain points of Christ’s doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure, which is the way of heretics. The subject-matter of both faith and heresy is, therefore, the deposit of the faith, that is, the sum total of truths revealed in Scripture and Tradition as proposed to our belief by the Church. The believer accepts the whole deposit as proposed by the Church; the heretic accepts only such parts of it as commend themselves to his own approval.

Once heresy is associated with false doctrine (and not simply doctrine which I and those like me happen not to hold), and once we understand that we are saved not merely by belief, but by belief in the truth, then it becomes evident that we need to know what is the actual doctrinal content of divine revelation; i.e., true doctrine. We cannot be content with Hunt’s softly skeptical assurance that we are all heretics, because heresy is not benign, it is cancerous. And if this cancer is in fact ubiquitous, then we are all in mortal peril.

As David Anders has recently shown, many Evangelicals are coming to terms with the implausibility of restorationism or Christian primitivism (whether of the confessional or fundamentalist variety) by adopting a more conciliatory attitude towards other groups of Christians, including Catholics and the Orthodox. The move from fundamentalism or confessional exclusivism to “we are all heretics” (or some other, less provocative, affirmation of ecumenical fallibility) seems to me to generally proceed along the following (hypothetical) line of reasoning:

There are all kinds loving, bright, dedicated groups of Christians, each committed to the Bible as the word of God. These groups contradict one another on what at least some of them take to be essential aspects of the biblical message. No individual or group is infallible in its interpretation of the Bible. Out of all this morass of theological opinion, who am I (or the particular denomination or congregation to which I belong) to say that such and so is orthodoxy, and that whoever disagrees with me (or my denomination or congregation) is a heretic? Conversely, who am I to say that my own doctrine or confession is particularly orthodox? Surely my personal interpretation of the Bible is not the standard of doctrine with which all Christians are bound to agree, or else fall short of the truth of Sacred Scripture and, perhaps, Heaven itself.

No, indeed. Neither your personal interpretation of the Bible, nor mine, is the Rule of Faith. But this does not entail that we are all heretics whenever we disagree and/or are divided. Nor need we revert to restorationism, in one its many permutations, in order to embrace a full and absolute orthodoxy. We could instead enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, which is both ancient and dogmatic, and furthermore is alive and active through the centuries in defining doctrine, protecting the faithful from the corrosive effects of heresy by building them up in the fullness of truth.

Calvin Preaching

Calvin was so strict about this that he even condemned the liturgy of the hours, since Scripture nowhere enjoins rising in the evening to pray.¹

According to Calvin, the central element of Christian worship is the preaching of Scripture by the ordained ministry. In his mind, this is the hinge on which all else turns. Even sacraments, for Calvin, derive their efficacy from the hearing of the preached word.

For this reason, Calvin’s liturgical writing and Geneva’s legislation insisted that the sacraments be performed before an assembled congregation, and always conjoined to the preaching ministry. Private masses or baptisms, including midwife or emergency baptisms, were forbidden. The words of institution were to be pronounced audibly and in the vernacular.²

To support his teaching on worship, Calvin pointed to the example of the early Church. (He was especially fond of Augustine.)  He also drew on the work of late medieval liturgists, the Reformer Martin Bucer, and, in constructing his own liturgies for Strasbourg and Geneva, he even drew on the structure of the Mass of the Roman Rite.  To what extent, though, were Calvin’s liturgy and theology of worship actually guided by Scripture? Does Scripture actually teach the form of worship and administration of sacraments envisioned by Calvin?

Scripture on the Administration of Baptism

Let’s begin with baptism. There are a number of baptisms in Scripture. However, I am at a loss to see how any one them conforms to the pattern set forth by Calvin. Leaving aside the very unliturgical and outdoor baptisms of John the Baptist, let us restrict ourselves to those performed in the post-resurrection Christian community. Do any of them suggest that baptism must be performed by an ordained minister, before an assembled congregation, and conjoined to the preaching of Scripture?

Matthew 28: 16-20 – Christ’s commission to the apostles: This text gives no explicit instruction on the timing or context of baptism. If anything, it seems to suggest that teaching is to follow baptism.

Acts 2:41- Peter calls on crowds to repent and be baptized. 3,000 are added to the Church. Again, no details on the administration of the sacrament.

Acts 8:36 – A baptism, administered by a deacon, performed by the side of the road.

Acts 9:18 -  Paul is baptized in a private home, by a prophet. Again, no indication of a public liturgy.

Acts 16:15- Lydia’s conversion. Baptized in the presence of Paul, Timothy, and Silas. No indication of a public liturgy.

Acts 16:33 – The Philippian jailor is baptized privately, “at that hour of the night.”

What can we conclude from Scripture? Baptisms can be performed in private homes, on the side of the road, in the dead of night, by deacons and prophets.

Scripture on the Administration of the Eucharist

What of the Eucharist? Does Scripture indicate that the Eucharist must be celebrated in a public setting and only when conjoined to the preaching of Scripture? It seems to me that the Reformers were on slightly firmer ground here, as Acts 2:42 and 1 Corinthians 11 clearly suggest that the Eucharist was a communal affair. However, these texts do not prescribe this, nor do they insist on the element of preaching.  The main prescription Paul gives is to follow the liturgical consensus and tradition of the Church.

Nor do the Gospel narratives of the institution clearly support Calvin’s views (Matt. 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22). I grant that Scripture reading was likely used on Holy Thursday as part of a passover meal, and that Christ’s words were audible and in the vernacular. However, the celebration was clearly private and domestic, in keeping with Jewish custom, and there is no indication that Christ limited future celebration to preaching liturgies.

Scripture on Preaching

Finally, what of the role of preaching, especially exegetical preaching, in Christian worship? There is clear evidence that the apostles practiced exegetical preaching in the context of outdoor evangelism, but there is nothing in Scripture which prescribes this for the Christian liturgy. I grant that Paul exhorts Timothy to know the Scriptures. The Bereans are also commended for their knowledge of Scripture. But there is no indication that this is to form the central place in Christian worship, nor that it is necessary for the celebration of the sacraments.

Tradition

The Catholic Church does conjoin Scripture and the Sacraments, and does value biblical preaching. But how does the Church know to do these things? The Scriptures themselves are remarkably obscure on these questions. In fact, the Protestant biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias reasoned that Scripture deliberately witholds information about the celebration of the sacraments, in keeping with the ancient Christian practice of the disciplina arcani. (Hiding the sacraments from the uninitiated.)³

The truth is, we only know how to conduct Christian worship from tradition.  As it turns out, Calvin himself had to construct his liturgy using traditional sources. Auguste Lecerf has noted that Geneva’s liturgy follows the main divisions of the Roman rite.  The tripartite structure of both the Mass and the Genevan liturgy consists in the Ante-communion (invocation, psalm, confession, prayer for illumination, reading and exposition of the sacred text, and prayers of intercession), the canon of the Mass (or liturgy of the Supper), and the post-communion (thanksgivings and benediction).  Like the sursum corda, moreover, Calvin’s invocation (“Our help is in the name of God …”) is a biblical text, but it comes into the Reformed liturgies directly through the missal.  (“Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.”)⁴

Conclusion:

In this post, I do not intend to criticize the Reformed liturgy. In fact, I find much there that is admirable and in common with Catholics. I wish to point out, rather, that the elements of Reformed worship simply cannot be sustained on the basis of Scripture alone. To be quite frank, if I believed in the “Regulative Principle,” I would say that the Pentecostal tradition would be on far stronger ground than the Reformed.  Theirs is a straightforward application of the principle: “Do what you see the apostles doing in Scripture.” And, “Follow Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 literally.”

1. Calvin writes, “Superstition may be viewed, either in itself, or in the disposition of the mind. In itself when men have the audacity to contrive what God has not commanded. Such are those actions which spring from will-worship, (ejqeloqrhskeia, Colossians 2:23,) Which is commonly called devotion [vulgo devotionem]. One man shall set up an idol, another shall build a chapels another shall appoint annual festivals, and innumerable things of the same nature. When men venture to take such liberties as to invent new modes of worship, that is superstition.” Commentary on Isaiah 1:14

   In 1549, Calvin writes to Bucer urging him to encourage Somerset in his opposition to superstition. “I have attempted to encourage the Lord Protector,” Calvin says, “and it will be your duty to insist … that those rites which savor of superstition be entirely removed.” In 1550 Calvin writes to Somerset again, urging him to stay the course “for the re-establishing of the Gospel in all its purity in England, and that every kind of superstition might be abolished.” In a short letter to King Edward in 1551, Calvin recalls the reign of Josiah, during which the king pursued godliness, although “there was still some remainder of bygone superstitions.” Calvin entreats the young monarch to follow the example of that biblical king, “that you might have the honor, not only of having overthrown impieties which are clearly repugnant to the honor and service of God, but also of having abolished and razed to the ground whatsoever served merely to nourish superstition.” To Cranmer, finally, in 1550, Calvin writes in order to encourage him to pursue the same path. See Calvin to Bucer, 21 October 1549, Letters 2: 233; Calvin to Somerset, January 1550, Letters 2: 258; Calvin to the King of England, January 1551, Letters 2: 301. On the important image of Josiah in Calvin’s conception of Christian kingship, see Graeme Murdock, “The Importance of Being Josiah: An Image of Calvinist Identity,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 1043-1059. Calvin to Cranmer, December 1550, Letters 2: 356-358. On Calvin’s critique of the liturgy of the hours, see Calvin, La famine spirituelle: sermon inédit sur Esaïe 55, 1-2 (Église française de Londres, Ms. viii. f. 2), ed. Max Engammare. English, trans. Francis Higman. (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 54.

2. Baptism is to be performed “with the whole church looking on as witness,” and accompanied by a recitation of the confession of faith “with which the catechumen should be instructed.” The supper, likewise, is to be “set before the church,” and accompanied by a sermon, the words of institution, excommunications, and a recitation of “the promises which were left to us in it.” It is to be concluded with “an exhortation to sincere faith and confession of faith, to love and behavior worthy of Christians.”Institutes, 1536 Edition ed. Ford Lewis Battles (Geneva: Eerdmans, 1995),122. See also Institutes 4.14.4; 4.15.20.
3. Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1962).
4. Auguste Lecerf, “The Liturgy of the Holy Supper at Geneva in 1542,” trans. Floyd D. Shafer, Reformed Liturgics 3 (1966): 208.

The Revelation of St John:
14 The Whore of Babylon”
Albrecht Dürer (1497-1498),

History has always posed a challenge to Protestant apologists.  However you construe the Reformation, there is always a yawing gulf of some sort between the Protestant present and the Catholic past. It demands explanation.

The traditional Protestant response has been that the Reformers recovered a gospel that had been lost.  In other words, Primitivism of some sort has played a key role in the Protestant apology.¹ The “Restoration” movement of the 19th century represents one of the strongest forms of this doctrine. Leaders like Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) presumed that nearly everything subsequent to the New Testament was ill-formed. Thus, he declared, “I have endeavored to read the Scriptures as though no one had read them before me.”² The most radical version of primitivism is the Mormon view that the entire church was lost in a “Great Apostasy.”

To explain why the Gospel was lost, Protestants have traditionally had recourse to the apocalyptic dimension. The Antichrist, identified with the Papacy, is to blame for the “smothering” of Gospel truth under a cloud of superstition and idolatry. This was the doctrine of Luther, of Calvin, and of the later Reformed tradition. Thus, the Westminster Confession states:

 There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof; but is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God. (WCF XX.6)

For a Protestant, the theory has much to commend it. History would seem to require something of apocalyptic dimensions to explain the utter and complete destruction of “true Christianity” from the earth in the earliest moments of Christian history. Otherwise, the situation for Protestant historians is dire. Newman, of course, said it best:

So much must the Protestant grant that, if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge, suddenly, silently, and without memorial; by a deluge coming in a night, and utterly soaking, rotting, heaving up, and hurrying off every vestige of what it found in the Church, before cock-crowing: so that ‘when they rose in the morning’ her true seed ‘were all dead corpses’—Nay dead and buried—and without grave-stone.³

Unfortunately for the Protestant historian, invoking the apocalypse is not as fashionable today. Major Protestant denominations have removed the condemnations of [pope as] Antichrist from their doctrinal statements. Historical scholarship has also rendered the theory less tenable. (As Newman noted, there just is no Protestant early Church to which one can appeal.) This calls for a new apologetic.  How to account for that yawning gulf?

I have noticed that a number of conservative Protestant writers now employ a hermeneutic of development to explain the gap between antiquity and the Reformation. On this view, the ancient church possessed only an incipient, inchoate form of Christianity. Continuity with modern Protestantism is therefore only implicit. Doctrines take shape in history, and become explicit, if at all, only through time and controversy.

I grant that this is not an entirely new approach. Protestant liberalism has always appealed to the concept of development. The more conservative Mercersburg theology of the 19th century also employed the theme. And, of course, the Catholic Church embraces a doctrine of development. What is surprising in recent evangelical appeals to development, however, is the willingness to relativize the core of their own doctrinal orthodoxy.

One striking example of this comes in the work of Allister Mcgrath. McGrath is a prolific, well-known, and respected evangelical theologian and historian. His book Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification is perhaps the definitive, English-language treatment of that subject. In the book, McGrath deals squarely with the fact that Luther’s understanding of the nature of justification is an utter novelty in the Christian tradition, “a complete theological novum.”⁴ Oddly enough, McGrath the evangelical makes no apologies for this. Instead, he declares,

 That there are no ‘forerunners of the Reformation doctrines of justification’ has little theological significance today, given current thinking on the nature of the development of doctrine.⁵

McGrath nowhere elaborates on this “current thinking,” so I am at a loss to determine why he thinks utter historical novelty has “little theological significance.” John Henry Newman, by contrast, the author of all “current thinking” on development, went to great pains to evaluate claims of development. Newman elaborated multiple “notes” to distinguish genuine development from corruption. No such elaboration is forthcoming from McGrath.

I find an equally casual, but more explicit, appeal to development in a recent article by Christianity Today senior writer Mark Galli (recently reviewed here by Bryan Cross). Galli contends that the early Church was characterized by “mass confusion,” and a “radical leveling” in which people of different ecclesiastical ranks spoke in God’s name, and offered mutually exclusive interpretations of Christianity. Only over time did something like consensus emerge:

 The full sweep of church history suggests that the Holy Spirit has, in fact, led us into all truth through no other way than men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile wrestling with one another about whatever issue is at hand until, in the Spirit’s good time, a consensus emerges.

Galli gives no indication of how to recognize a definitive consensus. Is it by conciliar authority? A majority or plurality of votes? Statistical sampling? In any event, this is a far cry from primitivism. Instead of the pristine purity of the early Church, Galli argues for mass confusion.  Applying this logic to current events, Galli suggests that clarity on issues like homosexuality and women’s ordination will only emerge over decades or centuries:  development; not recovery.

There is an interesting variation on this contrast between primitivism and development in another book reviewed by Devin Rose: John Armstrong’s Your Church is Too Small. Like the Reformers, Armstrong appeals to the past. Like Galli, however, Armstrong sees the early Church as characterized by confusion and division, with a weak consensus emerging only over time. Ironically, this is the feature of antiquity he finds appealing.

For Armstrong, doctrinal fluidity and a weak consensus are ideal; too much certainty is a bad thing. In his view, the doctrinal divisions of the Middle Ages and Reformation are unfortunate blemishes on the face of the Church. Armstrong celebrates current developments in world Christianity which, he thinks, portend a post-denominational era in which doctrinal divisions are significantly less important. Fluidity, change, and weak consensus are thus the hallmarks of vibrant Christianity.⁶

Assessment:

As a Catholic, I am obviously glad that many Protestants have left off blaming the “Papal Antichrist” for the loss of “true Christianity.” I am also glad that Protestant writers have commenced at least selective appropriation of the Catholic tradition. Protestant historian Mark Noll approvingly notes the current intellectual situation for Protestants:

Whenever evangelicals in recent years have been moved to admonish themselves and other evangelicals for weaknesses in ecclesiology, tradition, the intellectual life, sacraments, theology of culture, aesthetics, philosophical theology, or historical consciousness, the result has almost always been selective appreciation for elements of the Catholic tradition. Whatever Protestants may think of individual proposals, methods, or conclusions proceeding from any individual Catholic thinker, the growing evangelical willingness to pay respectful attention to the words and deeds of a whole host of Catholic intellectuals, beginning with Pope John Paul II, makes an important contribution to better intellectual effort.⁷

“Development” is one of these elements of Catholic tradition that Protestants have appropriated. However, I don’t think of this as an unqualified good. The title of this post (“Why Protestants Need the Antichrist”) is supposed, tongue in cheek, to suggest the problem.  In Protestant hands, the theory lacks a clearly identified “center” to evaluate claims of development, and to distinguish them from corruptions.

The spirit of classical Protestant apologetics is far different, and is captured in the name of Ulrich Zwingli’s famous treatise: The Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (1522). For centuries, the debate between Protestants and Catholics has not been whether or not we could attain doctrinal certainty, but rather what is the proper basis for doctrinal certainty. The virtue of primitivism, however spurious its central premise, is belief in a pristine clarity to which we can appeal.

The modern evangelical purveyors of development, by contrast, seem content to abandon doctrinal certainty. Some years ago, evangelical theologian David Wells foresaw this abandonment of truth. His No Place for Truth (1994) and The Courage to Be Protestant (2008) diagnosed an emerging Evangelical culture in which truth claims and theology are seen as impeding “relevance” and “ministry.” This is clearly the case with Armstrong, whose proposal is for a “missional” rather than doctrinal identity in the Church.

The Catholic view of development is far different. The guiding hand of the Church’s Magisterium distinguishes true from false development. Development is acknowledged, but there is still a clear center.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

 It is clear therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others. Working together, each in its own way, under the action of the one Holy Spirit, they all contribute effectively to the salvation of souls. (CCC 95)

Conclusion:

Jesus said, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:16) How can we fulfill Christ’s command to believe if we cannot know for certain what to believe? The historic (and primitive) Christian position has always been that we need certainty concerning this belief. The traditional Protestant view was that the pattern of the early Church (as found in Scripture) can provide this certainty.

It seems to me that many Protestants no longer believe this. In a recent article in the Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, Allister McGrath has acknowledged that both deep-seated and recent Protestant disputes about the meaning of the Sacred Text are “beyond resolution.”⁸ The question, therefore, becomes, “Do you accept some level of skepticism and doctrinal relativism, or do you appeal to an authority outside the Scriptures to resolve disputes about interpretation?”

We have highlighted one answer in this post: a new found trust in “development” to lead us into all truth. Handbook editor Gerald McDermott has signaled another approach. Speaking to First Things about his new book, he writes:

 The book, he says, “registers a major shift in Evangelicalism, from triumphalist disdain for the Great Tradition to self-critical recognition that Evangelical theology is doomed if it does not learn respectfully from that tradition.⁹

It is a good thing that some Evangelicals are showing more respect for “The Great Tradition.” Likewise, their openness to something like the Catholic doctrine of development suggests possibilities for future dialogue. However, “development” and “tradition” are no more self-interpreting than Scripture. By invoking these concepts, recent Protestant writers have merely broadened the dataset for interpretation. They have done nothing to bring clarity or authority to interpretation. On the contrary, some have actually weakened their own truth claims. For Protestants, there is now much less certainty than when Rome was safely rejected as Antichrist.

1. On this topic, see T. Dwight Bozeman’s To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
2. Cited in Mark Noll, America’s God: from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), >380.
3. http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/introduction.html.
4. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 34,215.
5. Ibid. 217-218.
6. John Armstrong, Your Church Is Too Small: Why Unity in Christ’s Mission Is Vital to the Future of the Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 14, 35.
7. Mark Noll, “The Evangelical Mind Today,” First Things (October, 2004).
8. Allister McGrath, “Tradition and the Interpretation of Scripture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, >ed. Gerald McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83.
9. “While We’re at It,” First Things (March, 2012).

Judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing, but each in different ways and with different consequences, and each in ways that continue to remain important in the present. This sums up the argument of the book. (p. 365)

Indeed, in his new book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (released January, 2012 by Belknap Press of Harvard University), historian Brad Gregory does not shy from bluntly assigning blame for contemporary problems, and there is a lot of blame to go around.

Drawing on an astounding breadth of knowledge across multiple disciplines, and with writing that is clear, poignant, and at times even funny, Gregory expertly tells the story of the western world of the last five centuries in a way that both enlightens as well as challenges. Gregory lays out the hard facts of history that force all in the western world, regardless of their religious persuasion or lack thereof, to confess mea culpa.

But, as indicated in the quotation above, Gregory doesn’t think that all are to be given the same kind of blame. Medieval Christendom’s failure historically speaking, Gregory insists throughout the book, “was not a function of the demonstrated or demonstrable falsity of central doctrinal claims of the Christian faith as promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church.” Instead, it was due to the

pervasive, long-standing, and undeniable failure of so many Christians, including members of the clergy both high and low, to live by the church’s own prescriptions and exhortations based on its truth claims about the Life Questions [meaning, purpose, and goal of life, etc]. It was at root a botching of moral execution, a failure to practice what was preached. (p. 366)

The Protestant Reformers were disturbed by this moral failure, as had Catholic reformers for centuries (e.g. St Francis of Assisi, St Catherine of Sienna, Erasmus, etc). But the Protestant Reformers differed from the Catholic reformers, and followed in a long line of those declared to be heretics by the Church, by diagnosing the problem as a theological one at its core. That much Protestants could agree on. But what exactly was wrong with Catholicism’s beliefs, or what its correct alternative was, as Gregory demonstrates, Protestants have been unable to agree on from the 1520s to the present, with disagreement increasing rather than diminishing over time.

This failure of the Reformation, according to Gregory, was “derived directly from the patent infeasibility of successfully applying the reformers’ own foundational principle [sola scriptura].” As a result,

the unintended problem created by the Reformation was therefore not simply a perpetuation of the inherited and still-present challenge of how to make human life more genuinely Christian, but also the new and compounding problem of how to know what true Christianity was. ‘Scripture alone’ was not a solution to this new problem, but its cause. (p. 368)

He concludes, and this is a primary point made in the book:

Hence, the Reformation is the most important distant historical source for contemporary Western hyperpluralism with respect to truth claims about meaning, morality, values, priorities, and purpose. (p. 369)

Brad Gregory

The failure of sola scriptura was quickly recognized by many, even in the 16th century, and the proposal of sola ratio – or, reason alone – was an attempt by some to circumnavigate the new theological impasse. Unfortunately, sola ratio, and its secularization of all realms of life, has also failed dramatically in achieving any kind of consensus regarding the Life Questions that are necessary for successful human community. Instead, the hyperpluralism created by sola scriptura, which was exacerbated rather than corrected by sola ratio, has led many contemporary people to conclude that all truth is relative and all morality subjective, leading to what Gregory calls the “Kingdom of Whatever.” Thus, Protestantism’s sola scriptura and its secular analog sola ratio are both failed attempts at articulating a coherent, workable alternative to Roman Catholicism (which never went away, but was sidelined relative to its previously prominent position).

Gregory deftly traces the effects of these two separate though closely linked attempts in six chapters that each focus on a particular area of life: ‘Excluding God,’ ‘Relativizing Doctrines,’ ‘Controlling the Churches,’ ‘Subjectivizing Morality,’ ‘Manufacturing the Goods Life,’ and ‘Secularizing Knowledge.’

In the end, Gregory contents himself with only one seemingly modest proposal:

Therefore, consistent with the academy’s commitments to the open pursuit of intellectual inquiry without ideological restrictions, to critical rationality, to the importance of rethinking and reconsidering, to the questioning of assumptions, to academic freedom, and motivated by the desire to shed light on our current problems and to seek more fruitful ways to address them, the contemporary academy should unsecularize itself. (p. 386)

He asks not for religion to be embraced necessarily, but only that the possibility of religious truth be brought back on the table.

In addition to the wonderfully clarifying main argument of the book, there were also other, smaller helpful insights scattered throughout: e.g. I was personally unaware of the adventist expectations of many of the initial reformers. I particularly appreciated Gregory’s insistence that the radical Reformation be given its due, pointing out that the radical reformers fundamentally differed from magisterial reformers only in their lack of success, or purposeful refusal, to wed themselves with secular power. Gregory argues that a hard distinction between magisterial reformers and radical reformers is ultimately unhelpful and only masks the truly vast diversity of Christian belief created within a few years of Luther’s insistence on sola scriptura.

And Gregory’s scathing critique of the modern normalization of avarice via capitalism in chapter five (‘Manufacturing the Goods Life’), particularly when put in its historical context (Gregory argues that consumerism was intended to be a common activity to unite and pacify otherwise divided and increasingly violent Christians), is a welcome and much needed challenge to our modern world’s consumerism.

Also, the main text’s 390 pages are supplemented by a further 150 pages of footnotes that greatly complement and often either further expound the main text or point to what appear to be other great resources. I kept a second bookmark in the footnotes section and checked it often, and I recommend any reader to do the same.

I have only two complaints:

The first is that while most of Gregory’s writing throughout the book is exceptional, I must warn the reader that at times he gets wordy and repetitive. At those times, I exhort the reader to trudge on: the book is more than worth it.

The second is that, and perhaps this is only because the last book I read before reading this one was by Marshall McLuhan, the role of new technology isn’t given any consideration. Gregory does note in his conclusion that one could analyze how other areas of life, including new forms of communication, were affected by the Reformation and its ensuing hyperpluralism. But Gregory seems to be saying that one could analyze how communication was changed by the Reformation rather than how the new forms of communication – namely, the printing press – affected or helped precipitate the Reformation, which to me seems to be an oversight, and might add further explanatory power to his assessment that the Reformation was inspired by widespread immorality in the medieval Church.

I also must note, and this is not a criticism but a heads-up to potential readers, that due to its attempt to pull together a great breadth of content, many theological, philosophical, and historical concepts and terms are assumed or given little explanation. While I encourage anyone to give the book a shot, those unstudied in those subjects will most likely find themselves lost or spending a good amount of time looking things up.

Gregory’s masterpiece is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why the world is the way it is and has the potential of becoming a landmark book of our times. In other words, if you decide to take a pass, and it later becomes big, remember that I told you so.

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society is available at Amazon in hardcover ($25.20) and for Kindle ($22.68).

There’s a great interview with Brad Gregory about the book over at the Harvard University Press website.

About the Author: Brad S. Gregory is the Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University (1996) and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1994-96). Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame in 2003, Gregory taught at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001. Gregory has two degrees in philosophy as well, both earned at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He has received teaching awards at Stanford and Notre Dame, and in 2005 was named the inaugural winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture as the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States. Gregory’s research focuses on Christianity in the Reformation era, the long-term effects of the Reformation, secularization in early modern and modern Western history, and methodology in the study of religion.

Brantly Millegan

Brantly Millegan is a part-time MAT student at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul, MN, while also working full-time as the Director of Family Faith Formation at St Francis Xavier Parish in Buffalo, MN. He and his lovely wife Krista joined the Catholic Church in 2010 while they were both undergraduates at Wheaton College (IL). They have two children (one of whom is due by the end of March). He blogs at Young, Evangelical, and Catholic.

John Armstrong recently responded to my review of his book. Here I’ll offer a reply to the points he raises.

Preconditions for Fruitful Ecumenical Dialogue

John Armstrong

In my “Reflection” on Armstrong’s book I made several arguments showing important problems with the fundamental program for unity that Armstrong sets out. One of my arguments showed that Armstrong’s criterion for Church unity — the first creeds and councils — is ad hoc. In his reply, he did not address this argument, or show how his position avoids the problem I raised. I’m not sure why he did not address my argument. From what he said, it seems he thinks that such discussions are intrinsically “polemical.”

He uses the terms “combat zone” and “polemical zone” to refer to the realm in which theological positions are criticized. He explains that he wants to avoid that realm, and thus avoid that discussion. I too surely do not want to engage in unnecessary polemics, or debate for debate’s sake. At the same time, I think that genuine ecumenical dialogue requires that we not only affirm the positive common ground we share, but also explain the problems and flaws we see in each other’s positions. It wouldn’t be a truly open or ultimately fruitful ecumenical dialogue if we could neither express our objections to each other’s positions nor present our replies to objections raised against our own. And if this open exchange is done in genuine charity and good will, it can help us mutually evaluate each other’s positions, and move forward together toward unity in the truth.

In his book Armstrong presented various criticisms of the Catholic position. So Armstrong himself enters “the combat zone” (in the sense of offering objections and criticisms) when he wants to criticize Catholic positions or arguments, including the ones I brought up. And I welcome criticisms of my position. I see that as a healthy part of robust, authentic truth-seeking ecumenical dialogue. But when I raised objections to his position, Armstrong responded by saying he wants to avoid the “combat zone.” My concern is that this rhetorical technique allows him to criticize my position while dismissing and not addressing the good-faith objections and criticisms raised against his own position. I think that the conditions for genuine ecumenical dialogue require us to try to avoid that technique. Genuine ecumenical dialogue not only admits criticism (in charity) of each other’s positions, but requires that we be open to consider and address carefully the criticisms raised against our own.

Armstrong says he does not have a “divine vocation to serve in the same space that [I feel] called to work within, namely one committed to the apologetical defense of various inter-church debates that, in my estimation, hinder missional-ecumenism.” But it seems to me that he is already in that space, defending a particular theological position. In that way he is using the same technique I mentioned above to advance and defend a position, criticize other positions, and then avoid addressing objections to his own position, by saying that he doesn’t have a divine vocation to serve in that space. I don’t think he is intentionally engaging in this technique; my impression is that he does not realize he is doing it. The fact is that we must employ reason and arguments, and be open to receiving and engaging objections against our own position, for ecumenical dialogue to advance. Focusing on what we have in common is a good place to start ecumenical dialogue, but if we stayed at that level, our ecumenical engagement would remain only superficial.

While building friendships with other Christians by working together to serve others in the corporal works of mercy is helpful, this by itself cannot overcome our divisions or lead to the perfect unity for which Christ prayed. It is possible to raise objections and point out problems, while ensuring an irenic tone in sincere charity. Arguments in their true sense do not have to devolve into polemics, insults, or mud-slinging. So I think Armstrong could (and should) irenically engage my arguments and objections, as part of an ongoing dialogue in which together we evaluate each other’s positions, carefully considering our mutual objections to and concerns regarding each other’s positions.

Apostolic Succession

Armstrong claimed that I “use apostolic succession … as a wedge for separation (unless you convert and come home to mother church) you are not truly catholic.” But the point of disagreement between Protestants and Catholics regarding apostolic succession is not whether I used it as a wedge when I referred to it as something that now separates us. The point of disagreement is rather the objective difference between what the Catholic Church teaches and practices regarding apostolic succession, and what Protestants believe about apostolic succession. The Catholic Church teaches that Protestant ecclesial communities are not Churches, precisely because these communities do not have apostolic succession. See Responsa ad quaestiones, ratified and confirmed by Pope Benedict in June, 2007. And Protestants explicitly reject apostolic succession, claiming instead to be apostolic through having the Apostles’ doctrine as contained in Scripture. So there is a real, objective, and important disagreement between Catholics and Protestants regarding apostolic succession. I’m not using that disagreement as a wedge of separation; the disagreement over apostolic succession is itself part of what in fact already objectively separates Protestants and Catholics, a separation I hope to help resolve at least in some small way. We cannot resolve this objective separation by refusing to talk about it, or by claiming that those who point out this disagreement are using it as a wedge. A blame-the-messenger approach would never allow us to engage the issues that presently separate us.

Yes, the Catholic Church believes that catholicity as a mark of the Church is present only where apostolic succession is present. From a Catholic perspective, to reject apostolic succession is to reject something that has been believed always, everywhere, and by all the faithful. The bishops who met at Nicea in AD 325 clearly believed and practiced apostolic succession. The practice of apostolic succession was not a novelty invented after the fourth century. So, the onus is on Armstrong to show how it is possible to be “catholic” while rejecting something that the unified Church of the first millennium believed and practiced. This is especially applicable since Armstrong claims that we should base our faith on the common doctrines and tradition believed and practiced by both East and West in the first millennium of the Church. Apostolic succession is indisputably one of these doctrines and practices, as evidenced by the fact that the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Oriental Orthodox Churches also believe in it and practice it.

Armstrong’s reply included this statement by a friend of his:

“Rose [in this review] really shows his bias against Protestants when he says that even if Protestants agree with Catholics on the doctrine of apostolic succession, it doesn’t matter since they don’t possess it. Even if Protestants agree with Catholics, they are still wrong!” This is the rub for all evangelical ecumenists like me. Telling one side in this sadly divided state with a response that says “You are wrong and we are right” is not the type of ecumenism that will lead us to deeper (experienced and shared) Spirit-given relational unity.”

I would like to point out that I did not say, “they are still wrong.” My point, with respect to apostolic succession, was not “Protestants are wrong and we are right.” Protestants themselves, insofar as they understand what Catholics and Orthodox mean by “apostolic succession,” affirm that they [i.e. Protestants] do not have what Catholics and Orthodox refer to by “apostolic succession.” Protestants deny that what Catholics and Orthodox refer to by ‘apostolic succession’ presently exists. My point was that even if Protestants came to accept the Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession, that in itself would not be sufficient for healing the way in which Protestants and Catholics are divided over apostolic succession. That’s because in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, apostolic succession is not merely a doctrine to be affirmed, but also a means by which apostolic authority has been handed down within the Church. And because of the organic ontological nature of apostolic authority transmitted through apostolic succession, that apostolic authority cannot be acquired or recovered merely by assenting to the doctrine of apostolic succession; it can be recovered only by reunion with those already having it.

Catholic Teaching on the Goal of Ecumenism

Armstrong claims that the post-Vatican II Catholic Church does not believe or teach that Protestants should come back to the Catholic Church. But that is not accurate. Of course Catholic ecumenical engagement with Protestants does not begin with a call to come back to the Catholic Church. That wouldn’t be helpful as a point from which to begin ecumenical dialogue. But that does not mean that the return of Protestants to full communion with the Catholic Church is not the hope, prayer, and vision of the Catholic Church. When we pray for “the reunion of all Christians” in the Daily Offering, we are not praying for the founding in the twenty-first (or any subsequent) century of a new, man-made institution composed of Protestants and Catholics. We are praying rather for the return by Protestants into full communion with the presently existing Catholic Church from which sadly the first Protestants went out in the sixteenth century.¹

The Catholic Church teaches the following:

Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.” (CCC 846)

According to the Catholic Church, Protestants who die as Protestants can be in a state of grace at their death only if they are in sufficiently non-culpable ignorance regarding the identity of the Catholic Church as the Church Christ founded and to which all men are called to enter for salvation. From a Catholic point of view, because Protestants do not have apostolic succession, they do not have the Eucharist. And that places Protestants in a gravely deficient position with respect to salvation: having only two (baptism and marriage) of the seven sacraments Christ instituted in His Church as means of sanctifying grace, not having the fullness of the truth of Christ’s revelation contained both in Scripture and in Tradition, as it has been developed and defined to this day in the Church by the Holy Spirit living in her, and not having the shepherds Christ has authorized through apostolic succession to lead and feed His sheep.

Is Return to the Catholic Church the way to Unity?

Armstrong wrote:

In Rose’s understanding the way to unity is simple and straightforward. I should come home to Rome! Yet in the practice of post-Vatican II ecumenism, and the teaching and practice of the last five popes, this is not what I see nor is it what I have experienced in my thousands of hours of conversation with Catholics. The lone exception to my experience usually comes from converts who have left Protestantism and seem to feel a deep need to do a kind of apologetics that shows why Rome is the ‘true church.’

If the Catholic Church is what she claims to be, then yes Armstrong should become Catholic. If the Eastern Orthodox Churches are what they claim to be [the true Church], Armstrong should become Eastern Orthodox. If neither are what they claim to be, then these Churches are making false claims about themselves, and Protestants are right to remain Protestant. How can we know? By studying history, examining evidence, laying out the arguments, and together comparing and evaluating our respective positions, all done prayerfully and charitably. I have come to believe that the Catholic Church is what she claims, and so, like someone who has discovered Christ, I seek to share it with others, the pearl of great price, so that they too may have it. I remain open to considering evidence that the Catholic Church is not the true Church, but Armstrong has not presented any in his response.

The ecumenical task requires that we address both the question of criteria by which each side defines itself, and what charity requires with respect to defining respective positions. I think charity requires that in ecumenical dialogue we allow each participating party to define its own position, rather than impose on that party our own understanding or interpretation or construal of its position. So this requires that I allow Armstrong to define and determine what his position is with respect to ecclesiology, soteriology, etc., and that he do the same for me. This requires of us the virtues of listening, patience, and humility, as we each allow the other to shape and correct our conception of the other’s position. Armstrong seemingly wants to define Catholic doctrine by way of his own experience, and by discrediting me as a “convert” from Protestantism who now feels a “deep need” to justify becoming Catholic. Catholic doctrine, however, is not rightly defined by one’s experience, but by what the Church formally teaches in her authoritative documents. And Armstrong should respect the rule of charity that (a) allows each side to define its own position, rather than attempting to stipulate the Catholic position based on his own experience, and (b) avoids the bulverism that dismisses the other person’s evidence and argumentation by way of deconstructive psychoanalysis (e.g. that I only say what I am saying because I have a “deep need” to justify my becoming Catholic).

The Catholic Standards: Experiences or Church Documents

Armstrong wrote: “But even here I have scores of Catholic friends who do not adopt Rose’s view.” Again, as I explained above, the standard for the doctrine of the Catholic Church isn’t ultimately our own personal experience; nor is it even what some percentage of Catholics happen to believe. It is the magisterial teaching of the Church inscribed in her authoritative documents and taught by the pope and the bishops in communion with him. (See Cardinal George’s statement about that recently in the first minute of this video.) Sadly, sometimes even clergy can misrepresent Catholic teaching, and it is possible that this has happened with some of those who have interacted with Armstrong. I would invite and challenge him to present these questions to Cardinal George in his upcoming dialogue.

Armstrong continued by saying:

Conservative Catholic apologists take the supposed high ground by using the official teaching of the church on most matters but they seem to miss that there is a continued unfolding of what their church is also saying about unity with non-Catholics, especially since Vatican II. Having spent time inside the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity I speak from firsthand experience, not simply from books and documents. (I have read scores of these books and documents as well and find in these a rich treasury that calls us to new ecumenism!) Having read and discussed ecumenism in inter-church contexts, both in and outside of the United States, I have a perspective which clearly is not the same as Devin’s.

While I acknowledge a continued unfolding — the legitimate development of doctrine — of the inexhaustible treasure that is the deposit of faith, what Armstrong must realize regarding the Catholic Church is that the Church cannot reverse her dogmas. Genuine ecumenical dialogue, in which we allow each participating party to define its own position requires of participating Protestants that they acknowledge that according to the Catholic Church, no Catholic dogma can be reversed or negated, not even by the Catholic Church. According to the Catholic Church, the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church. Armstrong does not quote anything from the Catholic Church supporting his position regarding what he thinks Catholic teaching is; he only appeals to his experience. But again, the Church’s teaching is not defined by his experience, but in her authoritative documents.

In spite of what I presented in my reflection, Armstrong persists in thinking that there is a legitimate strain of thought — a “new ecumenism” — in the Catholic Church that can win out and become the Church’s teaching, essentially falsifying certain ecclesiological dogmas formulated over the past two millennia. But that’s not ecumenically charitable. Charity calls Protestants to acknowledge that according to the Catholic Church, Catholic dogmas are irreversible, and therefore that from an authentic Catholic self-understanding, these ecclesiological dogmas cannot be overturned. Because Armstrong is a Protestant and doesn’t believe that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be, I can understand how he rejects the belief that Catholic dogmas are irreversible. This seems to be why he continues to wait for substantial changes to the “sectarian” view that the Catholic Church is the true Church Christ founded. But I think charity requires allowing the Catholic party in ecumenical dialogue to define its own position, and thus acknowledging that from the Catholic perspective, the Catholic Church can never deny that she is the Church Christ founded, and that true unity requires a return to full communion with her. Accurately understanding and depicting each other’s positions seems to be the proper ecumenical point of departure.

Baptism and Eucharist

Armstrong and his friend write:

“While the Catholic Church accepts my baptism they do not, in most contexts, commune me. Am I the only person who finds this stance in-congruent? … “What is amazing from an ecumenist’s viewpoint [is] that one doctrine makes us one in Christ while the other keeps us separated.” Sadly, this is my conclusion as well.”

The Catholic Church teaches that only those who are in full communion with the Church should receive communion. The Eucharist is a sign of our full communion, including our affirmation of the “one faith” taught by the Catholic Church. The act of receiving the Eucharist is itself saying “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.” So one who does not believe that should not receive the Eucharist. The Catholic Church is a visible body, and persons who have not even requested to be admitted to full communion with that body, and do not affirm the faith of that body, would be denying the communal meaning of the Eucharist if they were to receive the Eucharist.

Concerning this question, in 2003 Pope John Paul II wrote:

The celebration of the Eucharist, however, cannot be the starting-point for communion; it presupposes that communion already exists, a communion which it seeks to consolidate and bring to perfection. The sacrament is an expression of this bond of communion both in its invisible dimension, which, in Christ and through the working of the Holy Spirit, unites us to the Father and among ourselves, and in its visible dimension, which entails communion in the teaching of the Apostles, in the sacraments and in the Church’s hierarchical order. The profound relationship between the invisible and the visible elements of ecclesial communion is constitutive of the Church as the sacrament of salvation. Only in this context can there be a legitimate celebration of the Eucharist and true participation in it. Consequently it is an intrinsic requirement of the Eucharist that it should be celebrated in communion, and specifically maintaining the various bonds of that communion intact.²

A bit later in the document he wrote:

Precisely because the Church’s unity, which the Eucharist brings about through the Lord’s sacrifice and by communion in his body and blood, absolutely requires full communion in the bonds of the profession of faith, the sacraments and ecclesiastical governance, it is not possible to celebrate together the same Eucharistic liturgy until those bonds are fully re-established. Any such concelebration would not be a valid means, and might well prove instead to be an obstacle, to the attainment of full communion, by weakening the sense of how far we remain from this goal and by introducing or exacerbating ambiguities with regard to one or another truth of the faith. The path towards full unity can only be undertaken in truth. In this area, the prohibitions of Church law leave no room for uncertainty, in fidelity to the moral norm laid down by the Second Vatican Council.³

These quotations explain briefly why the Catholic Eucharist is limited only to those who affirm the Catholic faith. Armstrong’s objection to the restriction of the Eucharist to those professing the Catholic faith raises the authority question. Who has the authority to decide for the Catholic Church which persons are permitted to receive the Eucharist? Surely the answer to that question cannot be non-Catholics. And in the Catholic paradigm it makes perfect sense, according to the meaning of the Eucharist, why only those persons holding the Catholic faith may receive the Eucharist. This sacrament would have no such communal significance if it were given indiscriminately, even to those who knowingly deny Catholic dogmas.

As a Baptist, I would not have dreamed of receiving communion in the Catholic Church. I intuitively understood that Catholics believed something about the Eucharist that was quite different from what I believed. And in any case, who was I as a Baptist to argue that the Catholic Church should give me communion?

The doctrines surrounding the sacraments developed over centuries. Who are valid ministers and recipients of a particular sacrament? What is the form, and what is the matter for each one? What renders a sacrament invalid? As noted in my article, Armstrong mentioned somewhere that he believes that there are more than seven sacraments. Who gets to decide these questions? John Armstrong? The Reformed Church in America (RCA)? The Catholic Church? This is the question of authority, always lurking just behind such dialogues. We cannot ignore it, but must face it head-on by employing arguments and providing principled reasons for our beliefs, to determine who has the authority to give a normative answer to such questions for the Church.

From my point of view as a Catholic, I would respond in the following way to Armstrong’s question regarding the asymmetry between the Catholic position on the Protestant relation to baptism and the Catholic position on the Protestant relation to the Eucharist. The Catholic Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, discerned that baptism, as the sacrament whereby one is regenerated and united to Christ and His Church, could in necessity be administered validly by anyone who used water and the proper Trinitarian formula with the intention of doing what the Church does.⁴ Hence from a Catholic perspective Protestants have a valid baptism and are thereby incorporated into Christ. We rejoice in this. But she also discerned that the Eucharist should be received only by those who affirm the Catholic faith. This is not incongruent. We need not presuppose that all the sacraments must have the same kinds of possible ministers and recipients. Such a presupposition almost undermines the very plurality of the sacraments, since if the sacraments all did the very same thing, there would be no need for more than one.

Does Silence Equal Ignorance?

Armstrong wrote:

Devin Rose does not seem to recognize some of the very official agreements that the Vatican has signed that are game changers in terms of using “old” arguments and recognizing “new” groundbreaking agreements that we now have at many levels. I think especially of The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999).

None of my arguments depends on the Joint Declaration. The fact that I did not mention the Joint Declaration does not falsify anything I said. In fact I have read the Joint Declaration, as well as the writings of various theologians and popes on the weight and authority that it has. I do think that Catholics and Protestants have made progress in our mutual understanding of each other on scores of doctrines, including justification. Called to Communion has published many blog posts and articles that have focused on this important doctrine.

But though we have made progress in some ways, we still remain divided. The Joint Declaration is a sign of a greater warmth and openness in dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans. And it helps clarify the common ground we can affirm together regarding justification. And this is a cause for gratitude to God, and rejoicing. But the Joint Declaration did not result in the unification of any Lutheran denominations with the Catholic Church. This declaration, while noteworthy and important, has not changed the Church’s dogmas on justification or been to this point a “game changer” (in terms of effecting visible reunion) with respect to healing the Protestant-Catholic schism.

Problems Left Unaddressed

Finally, I would like to point out that Armstrong did not respond to the following objections I raised in my review of his book: (a) the arbitrariness of his “core orthodoxy,” (b) the absence of a principled basis for distinguishing between branches within and schisms from, (c) his justification for redefining ‘schism’ as heresy, and thus losing the very concept of schism, (d) the error of appealing to dissenters, to determine what the Catholic Church formally teaches, and (e) the limitations to missional-ecumenism, which I carefully explained and defended in my article. To move forward toward mutual understanding and therefore to unity in the fullness of the truth, I would like to see Armstrong carefully engage these objections offered in humility and charity.

Devin Rose

Devin Rose is the author of If Protestantism is True: The Reformation Meets Rome (2011). He blogs at St. Joseph’s Vanguard.

1. For an examination of the ecumenism of non-return, see, “Ecclesial Unity and Outdoing Christ: A Dilemma for the Ecumenism of Non-Return.”
2. Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 35.
3. Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 44.
4. Catechism of the Council of Trent.

In answer to this question we must say “It depends.”

Some folks think that Catholic acceptance of any Protestant Baptism at all is a Vatican II novelty. This is not the case. Here is what the Catechism of the Council of Trent says:

Those who may administer Baptism in case of necessity, but without its solemn ceremonies, hold the last place; and in this class are included all, even the laity, men and women, to whatever sect they may belong. This office extends in case of necessity, even to Jews, infidels and heretics, provided, however, they intend to do what the Catholic Church does in that act of her ministry. These things were established by many decrees of the ancient Fathers and Councils; and the holy Council of Trent denounces anathema against those who dare to say, that Baptism, even when administered by heretics, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the Church does, is not true Baptism. [source; emphasis added]

River baptism, Pibel, Nebraska, 1913.
Photographer unknown
International Center of Photography

Some might object that Protestant intentions in baptism are not Catholic ones, but that is not how the Church sees things. As Pope Leo XIII said in 1896:

The Church does not judge about the mind and intention, in so far as it is something by its nature internal; but in so far as it is manifested externally she is bound to judge concerning it. A person who has correctly and seriously used the requisite matter and form to effect and confer a sacrament is presumed for that very reason to have intended to do (intendisse) what the Church does. On this principle rests the doctrine that a Sacrament is truly conferred by the ministry of one who is a heretic or unbaptized, provided the Catholic rite be employed. [Apostolicae Curae 33; emphasis added]

The Church does not judge the mind, just because no man can know another’s heart. So instead it is actions that are considered, and if the actions in a Baptism include the correct matter and form, then the presumption is that the Baptism is valid. So the next and obvious question is: what is the matter and form of Baptism? The Catechism of the Council of Trent informs us:

Now since we said above, when treating of the Sacraments in general, that every Sacrament consists of matter and form, it is therefore necessary that pastors point out what constitutes each of these in Baptism. The matter, then, or element of this Sacrament, is any sort of natural water, which is simply and without qualification commonly called water, be it sea water, river water, water from a pond, well or fountain.

…

Pastors, therefore, should teach, in clear, unambiguous language, intelligible to every capacity, that the true and essential form of Baptism is: I baptise thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. For so it was delivered by our Lord and Saviour when, as we read in St. Matthew He gave to His Apostles the command: Going,… teach ye all nations: baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. [source]

So we see that if Protestants baptize with water using the correct words (“I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”), the baptism is considered to be valid, and this is no “novelty” of Vatican II. It’s reasonable to be uncertain in specific cases, until we know whether the correct form of words was used or not. But for the vast majority of Protestants, this is just not an issue. Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans all use the correct formula.