In view of the generally miserable shape of the Protestant Church in today’s world, many are returning to Rome. This is understandable, because in shifting times, Rome offers genuine consistency and stability. One must not forget, however, that the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century took place for very real reasons, not all of which have been healed by time. Therefore, I address a number of objections that were raised by the Reformers, which have yet to be dealt with by Roman authorities. When and if they are, I predict genuine rapprochement in the Church will become possible.
Clerical Celibacy. Clerical celibacy is not Scriptural, and is in fact contrary to the practice of the early Church. For some reason, abstemious behavior has always plagued religions, and Christianity has not been immune. No good thing has been immune to prohibition: food in general, meat in particular, alcohol in all its forms, recreation, sleep, comfort, and of course, sex. The irony is obvious, because Christianity is in fact the most physical, humane, and merciful of religions. Efforts to curtail the opportunity to marry and have families have been based upon many considerations, some potentially valid. One that is valid is a desire to be free from distractions in ministry. Others that are not valid are the Church’s desire there be no wives and children to contest inheritance rights. A modern corollary is that single priests have lower salary demands.
The prohibition on clerical marriage is a policy, not dogma, and can be changed at any time by Papal edict. It is time for such an edict. Whatever marginal benefits unmarried clergy might provide, the costs are far greater. Since the inception of marriage prohibitions there has been violation on both sides of the fence. On the one hand, clergy have continued to have sex with women and beget children, no doubt to the harm of all. On the other hand, Holy Orders have attracted sodomites who feel the ministry will explain why they are not married. The damage done to the Roman Catholic Church and the reputation of our Lord Jesus Christ is incalculable. Clerical celibacy has given many people the excuse they need for why they do not have to go to church.
Mary. God bless Mary. Preoccupation with Augustine’s teaching that Original Sin was transmitted through sexual intercourse means that Mary, if a child of normal sexual relations by her parents, must have been sinful. And if she were sinful, how is it that her child, our Lord, was not somehow contaminated? All this is nonsense. Mary was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit; Jesus was in fact the Son of God by a miracle. No father was involved. On the one hand, it can be argued that sin is passed on by fathers, not mothers. Whatever. A more reliable argument is that when Jesus took the sins of the whole world upon himself on the Cross, the sins of all were atoned for. There is no limit to the power of the blood of Jesus, in spite of what Calvin says. Christ’s sacrifice justified all, including those born before Good Friday. This includes Mary. Most compelling, however, is the fact that Original Sin is a human construct, not necessarily a Scriptural one. It implies the presence of something pernicious. A better understanding is that it is not a presence, but a lack. As of the Fall we lost our spirit, and in its absence we find ourselves incapable of doing right. When we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we recover our capacity for holy living.
And while we’re at it, the whole business of praying to saints has to go. In the words of Jesus, “I am not saying that I will ask the Father on your behalf. No, the Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.” If Jesus says this about himself, then all the more reason that we should we pray directly to the Father and bypass the whole panoply of saints and martyrs. It has been said that when Christianity became the state religion of Rome, Roman Catholic theology became a pagan script with a Christian cast. There is some merit to this view. Cut out the middlemen, and go straight to the source, the Father, as Jesus admonishes us.
Transubstantiation. Historically, the sacrament of Holy Communion has been the crux of disagreement between Roman and Protestant. The Catholic understanding is that with the words of institution, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus. He is re-sacrificed each time the Eucharist is celebrated, and when he is sacrificed, grace is released to the participants. More on grace anon. To one degree or another, this understanding was rejected by the Reformers. It variously became a memorial only, or the body and blood of Christ while remaining bread and wine, or somewhere in between. In typical Anglican indecision, the elements conveyed the “real presence” of Jesus, whatever that means. All this may be missing the point Jesus was making at the Last Supper.
Good sacramental theology addresses the value of the sacrament from two perspectives, that of God and that of men. First, God’s point of view. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist, he was a Jew speaking to Jews and talking about a new covenant. What would the apostles have heard? If this was a new covenant, what was the old? They would have harkened back to Genesis 15 and the inauguration of the first covenant. And what did that ceremony consist of? It involved flaying animals, placing them in a ditch, and then walking between the animal halves in the company of the other testator. Reference is made to this practice in Jeremiah 34, where it is clear that if the covenant is broken, the fate of the transgressor would be the same as that of an animal that was cut in two. In the case of Genesis 15, the covenant was consummated by a flaming torch and a smoking pot, perhaps the Father and the Son, without the help of Abraham, who was asleep. So if this was the form and meaning of the first covenant, what about the second, new covenant established by Jesus? His emphasis was not on the fact that the bread and wine were becoming his body and blood, but that the bread and wine represented his body and blood, as opposed to that of animals. Thus, the new covenant would be based upon the flaying of the Lamb of God, and therefore be final and perfect. When Christians kneel at the altar and receive the consecrated bread and wine, they are reissuing an invitation to God to come into their hearts and nourish the life of Jesus in them, that he might rule as Lord of their lives. This invitation must be restated on a regular basis, just as the body needs food for nourishment on a regular basis. We are confessing our need for power from without, from Jesus himself.
From man’s perspective, we need to be assured that we, no less than the apostles, are included in the new covenant. It is an anamnesis, more than a memorial, where the basis of the new covenant is recapitulated in our presence to make a transcendent event personal. Note, the new covenant was solemnized at the Last Supper, not the Cross. The Eucharist is not designed to repeat Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross; the Cross and our justification are more closely related to Baptism. Rather, Communion is to be associated with the prior establishment of a new covenant the night before, when Jesus instructed his disciples in great detail and prayed for them. Although the Synoptics recount only the words of institution, John devotes five chapters to instruction on how the disciples, and we, are to treat each other, as demonstrated in the washing of feet. Further, he talked of the coming of the Holy Spirit and how we would enjoy a new dimension of fellowship with him. If there is a miracle in the Eucharist, and there is, it is not that the elements become the body and blood of Jesus per se, but that the loaf and cup become the same loaf and cup Jesus used that Last Supper. Instead of bringing God to us, as transubstantiation attempts to do, we should understand that the purpose of the Eucharist, and all sacramental ministry, is to take us to God. Again, not the Cross so much as the Last Supper. We were there, and the promises and commissions Jesus gave the disciples in John chapters 13 through 17 he gives to us anew each week. We are heritors of his ministry no less than they. The Liturgy of the Word tells us what has happened to others. The Liturgy of the Table allows those same things to happen to us. Isn’t that enough?
Doctrine of Grace. Rome and Reformer agree that without grace, we are nothing. The question is, what is grace, and how is it generated and received? Rome has rightly stated that Grace, in all its forms, emanates from Christ and is most readily received in the sacraments of the Church. The list of forms and functions of grace is beyond the scope of this appeal, but suffice it to say that to a Protestant, Roman Catholic teaching appears to hold that grace is an impersonal, fungible asset that can variously be received as a gift, earned as a payment, kept until death, and exchanged, if in sufficient quantity, for eternal life. Further, the Catholic Church claims to be the sole dispenser of grace, as a corollary to the keys to heaven having been given to Peter in Matthew 16. Grace, they say, is conveyed through the seven sacraments, and as such, membership in the Catholic Church is a requirement for receiving it. What is good about this approach is that Rome has not confused justification, the forgiveness of sins, with salvation, success at the final judgment where we are judged for the good we either did or did not do. This is a necessary distinction found in Paul, Hebrews, and Jesus’ parables. Simply stated, God is looking for a response to his redemptive acts in history. There are things he alone can do, and other things he expects us to do, or stop doing, that he will not do for us. We can influence our spiritual destiny by decisions and actions taken in life. Our lives are sacred; they mean something.
The Roman approach is bad, however, in that grace is described as an impersonal force that can put God in debt to his creation, as if his relationship to his children were somehow transactional. God is sovereign, and cannot be manipulated by his creatures, for good or ill. The parsing of grace into types and sequences is to do violence to the fundamental fact that grace is not a force, but a person. Remember that we are placed in Christ legally or forensically by the Cross, and Jesus is placed in us effectually, at least in potential, by Pentecost. This mutual interpenetration is God’s solution to the damage done to his children by the Fall, when we became morally guilty and spiritually craven, unable to effect reform by our own efforts. It is only by having Christ in us that we are able to escape from the dilemma Paul describes in Romans 7, where we can know right, but cannot do it. Thus, grace in all its forms is simply the Spirit of Jesus in us, distributed to all who submit to Him as Lord. This makes sense of the warning about the only unforgiveable sin, blaspheming the Holy Spirit. If you grieve the Spirit of Jesus in you, he will leave and we will be left to struggle through life unable to bear fruit and be saved. This also explains the phenomenon of hardening, where God, in his love for us, shows us in this life what existence is like without God, that we might repent and avoid an eternity without him after death.
If grace is Jesus in us, we can come to an understanding of how grace is conferred, received and maintained. Just as we should be kind to guests in our home, we should be kind to Jesus in our hearts. He is Savior, to be sure, but he also has a second title, that of Lord. The relationship of a subject to his lord is one of submission of the lesser to the greater. This leads to a new definition of a Christian: a Christian is somebody, anybody, who is willing to receive both forgiveness of sins and power vicariously from another, even Jesus Christ. Jesus is not fungible; you do not receive him as payment for a debt, nor as a reward for good going. You receive him on the basis of pure gift that must be treasured and obeyed if you are to play host to him as the Father intends.
The Catholic Church has done a wonderful job of keeping grace front and center; it has allowed them to continue to talk about behavior and authority, long after the Protestant Church has abandoned these concepts as unnecessary or philosophically untenable. Take this one step and personalize grace, as Jacobus Arminius did, when he would capitalize Divine Grace when referring to the Holy Spirit.
The Ordo Salutis. What separates Christians and indeed all theistic religions is how they explain God’s redemption of a sinful humanity. A summary of such a formula has been preserved for us in Romans 8:29 and 30. These two verses have caused more confusion than they have allayed because the sequence the events are listed in: foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, and glorification, makes no sense. How can we be justified, forgiven, late in the process? Protestants in the Reformed tradition are particularly flummoxed, because they maintain that some are justified by divine fiat, and therefore confuse foreknowledge with justification. Rome has dealt with the confusion by calling salvation a process that is peculiar to the individual, dependent upon the accumulation of grace.
All confusion can be avoided, however, simply by reading the verses as a chiasmus, reflecting Paul’s training as a rabbinical scholar. Thus, the first and last actions of foreknowledge and glorification, are monergistic actions of the Father, reflecting decisions made in his eternal counsels about what kind or class of people will benefit from his plan of redemption. Predestination to actual sanctification and thus conformance to Christ’s likeness, the second reality, and justification, the fourth, are monergistic actions of the Father involving the earthly, temporal ministry of his Son Jesus. We are justified by his death and we are sanctified by his on-going resurrected and ascended life. The conclusion of the chiasmus, the third reality, is calling, namely, the on-going ministry of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who are triumphing over the difficulties of actual life in a hostile world. Thus we have God acting to redeem us, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not as a linear sequence as a Western or Greek reader would expect.
The advantage of this hermeneutic should be recognized by both Roman and Reformer. The Catholic reader doesn’t have to come up with a mercantilistic understanding of grace nor a mechanistic view of the Sacraments to lead a successful life. They simply have to understand that both our problems of moral guilt and powerlessness are taken care of by Christ, first in his death and then by his life. The Protestant, and especially those in the Reformed tradition, can redefine those concepts that have become twisted and therefore injurious to the reputation of God: foreknowledge, predestination, and calling. Foreknowledge refers to types or classes of people, not individuals. God has simply said this plan of redemption will benefit those who love him, not those who hate him. And predestination no longer refers to the selection of some for salvation and some for reprobation, but rather the desire on God’s part that those whom he adopts as children should resemble, more and more, his Son Jesus while they live. He wants genuine, observable improvements in us as we play host to the Spirit of his Son. Finally, calling becomes a rational event in the lives of believers, where they experience the incoming of the Holy Spirit, and henceforth choose to obey God rather than the destructive forces in the lost world around them.
I’m done. The validity of the mission and work of the Catholic Church cannot be over-stated. It constitutes an enduring witness to sacred history that has changed little, thankfully, for over two millenia. Its tradition of requiring a response to God’s saving initiatives is correct, and stands in stark contrast to the Protestant inclination to speak of justification as the be all and end all of Christian experience. The Catholic Church stands almost alone in resisting the encroachments of modern society in terms of behavioral mores, sexual activity that cannot accommodate reproduction, abortion, euthanasia, divorce, and coercive political movements. In the main, she does things right, even if for the wrong reasons. Any hope for ecumenical rapprochement or evangelical success must, of necessity, involve the Roman Catholic Church. This is important because Jesus will not return until his Church, his bride, reaches some degree of maturity. There is much the Protestant Church needs to repent of as well, notably the ordination of female presbyters and the accommodation of sexual deviance. All thoughtful and obedient Christians want and pray for the Church to be one, holy Catholic and Apostolic. If a few impediments on either side can be dealt with, that vision that seems so far off can become a reality.
