The Protestant's Dilemma: A Review (Part One)

Recently I picked up The Protestant's Dilemma: How the Reformation’s Shocking Consequences Point to the Truth of Catholicism (San Diego: Catholic Answers Press, 2014). In the preface of the Kindle edition, an unidentified author states that the primary author, Devin Rose, has put forth a book looking to engage in "dialogue" specifically"with members of the thousands of Protestant sects." The book is said to raise issues that a Protestant "has never considered before," not simply to have dialogue for the sake of mutual understanding, but rather to have "conciliar" dialogue in which the goal is to show the logical inconsistency of Protestantism while leading a reader into "the fullness of truth that Catholic Church alone possesses in fullness." In response, I offer these reviews of The Protestant's Dilemma (T.P.D.), to demonstrate that the book does the opposite of its intentions. It presents caricatures of Protestant positions, illogical conclusions, shoddy documentation, assumes the truth of the Roman Catholic worldview without proving it, and demonstrates that the author did not apply his own criteria to his own position.

The Conversion Story
It's not surprising that T.P.D. begins with the conversion story of the author.

Conversion stories like that offered by Mr. Rose typically point to the abilities of a person and the supposed wisdom gained by crossing the Tiber. For instance, Rose begins by showing how as a new convert to Christianity, he was already quick to ask about the problem of multiple denominations: "How had I, a newly minted Christian, come so quickly to a conclusion about which denomination taught the real truth?" He says also,

It was never a question in my mind that God is a reasonable being. I assumed it to be true, because even as an atheist I observed that the world functioned in a logical manner: Scientific laws were provable, mathematics could produce correct answers to problems, and deductive and inductive reasoning were demonstrably useful for understanding reality. The Christian faith, therefore, must also be supported by sound reasons, even if its truths also exceeded the limits of what reason could prove. I brought such an analysis with me into my new found faith, and I discovered that Protestantism’s tenets led to untenable conclusions. It simply was not possible to maintain a reasonable basis for my Christian faith while remaining Protestant.

This is not to say that reason is not important, or that people should not reasonably think about their faith. What irks me about Rome's converts is that they take their reasoning only so far. Rose's conversion story displays the same logical inconsistency that most of them do. His story is filled with the traumatic uncertainly felt as a Protestant and then the joys of certainly that a conversion to Roman Catholicism brings. The author states as a Protestant he "prayed that Jesus would guide [him] into the denomination that was the truest." He was befuddled by Christians "claiming to be 'led by the Holy Spirit'" using the "the Bible alone" and having different understandings of the Bible. He asks, "How did I know who was right?" He concluded that the Holy Spirit would lead such a person to the true church, this along with "investigating the Catholic Church in earnest." What Rome's converts rarely admit though is that the story they so cling to as an objective reality is a subjective experience, as all personal stories are. There's not much different between this story and that put forth by a Mormon or an Islamic convert (and particularly a convert to Orthodoxy). It was the fallible decision of Devin Rose to conclude that Rome was the true church.

Elsewhere in T.P.D. the author speaks against "the principle of private judgment." He states,

You are right. It all started to happen in the 16th century. Before that there was not denominations; there was one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.

Oh, you must know that is not true today nor was up to the in the 16th century .

The church of Rome is basically invisible in the NT, and the largest deformation of it, though it retains enough Truth whereby a relative few souls within it may actually come to Christ as damned and destitute sinners, casting all their faith upon the risen Son of God to save them by His sinless shed blood, and which is my prayer.

And RCs today are overall liberal (at least in the West) and less unified in basic values and many core truths than evangelicals, while Rome treats even proabortion, prohomo, promuslim pols as members in life and in death, and a near majority which support such, which partly evidences what Rome really believes (Ja. 2:18; Mt. 7:20) and is more substantial and speaks louder than some paper conservative statements.

In addition, Catholicism exists in formal sects and schisms, the latter including the EOs who substantially differ with Rome.

Which goes back quite a way.

There is a claim that "the church was unified under the pope until 1054". But there was a "schism" centuries earlier than that, which is a far larger and messier divide than the 1054 schism between the Roman and Orthodox churches. It makes a lie of the "unified under the pope" claims of today's Roman Catholic apologists....

The churches in Asia, "the churches of the east", which had no idea that there was a "Petrine ministry" for many centuries, had as much of a claim to "apostolic succession" as did any of the European churches, and which grew far larger than any of the churches in Europe, before being snuffed out by Islam -- not in the 6th or 7th centuries, but the 12th and 13th centuries, likely a response to (a) the Mongol invasions (which were favorable to Christianity), and (b) the Crusades. (Not saying there were no massacres prior to the Crusades. But the Crusades exacerbated a bad situation).

Here are a couple of works overviewing these "Churches of the East":

Samuel Hugh Moffett: "A History of Christianity in Asia"

Philip Jenkins: The Lost History of Christianity

Mar Bawai Soro: The Church of the East: Apostolic and Orthodox

Here is how Moffett describes this "Great Schism" of the 5th century:

What finally divided the early church, East from West, Asia from Europe, was neither war nor persecution, but the blight of a violent theological controversy, that raged through the Mediterranean world in the second quarter of the fifth century. It came to be called the Nestorian controversy, and how much of it was theological and how much political is still being debated, but it irreversibly split the church not only east and west but also north and south and cracked it into so many pieces that it was never the same again. Out of it came an ill-fitting name for the church in non-Roman Asia, "Nestorian."

Of course, Nestorius was accused of things (by Cyril) that he never espoused. Moffett also goes into a good bit of detail about this. More .

And then you have the unity of the church of Rome leading up to the Reformation:

Referring to the schism of the 14th and 15th centuries, Cardinal Ratzinger observed,

"For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation; she had become questionable in her whole objective form--the true Church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution.

"It is against this background of a profoundly shaken ecclesial consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the Church, ultimately came to experience the Church, not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for the Church of Rome, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” trans. by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989) p.196). http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/06/13/whos-in-charge-here-the-illusions-of-church-infallibility/)

Cardinal Bellarmine:

"Some years before the rise of the Lutheran and Calvinistic heresy, according to the testimony of those who were then alive, there was almost an entire abandonment of equity in ecclesiastical judgments; in morals, no discipline; in sacred literature, no erudition; in divine things, no reverence; religion was almost extinct. (Concio XXVIII. Opp. Vi. 296- Colon 1617, in “A History of the Articles of Religion,” by Charles Hardwick, Cp. 1, p. 10,)

Catholic historian Paul Johnson additionally described the existing social situation among the clergy at the time of the Reformation:

“Probably as many as half the men in orders had ‘wives’ and families. Behind all the New Learning and the theological debates, clerical celibacy was, in its own way, the biggest single issue at the Reformation. It was a great social problem and, other factors being equal, it tended to tip the balance in favour of reform. As a rule, the only hope for a child of a priest was to go into the Church himself, thus unwillingly or with no great enthusiasm, taking vows which he might subsequently regret: the evil tended to perpetuate itself.” (History of Christianity, pgs 269-270)

It presents caricatures of Protestant positions,

We see a lot of that from the ususal suspects here on FR. The "answering protestants" guy, for one example.

An irony about Rome's conversion stories is that one never knows when they're finished.

Some years back (unfortunately I did not keep bookmarks then) there was a particular conversion story put forward by the FR Romanists. This guy went from Jehovah's Witness, to Roman Catholic. OK, fine. Well, when you dug deeper into the guy's story, this convert had been everything. If I remember right, this convert'd been an independent fundamental baptist, an adventist, and Eastern Orthodox. And probably a few steps I've forgotten. He'd spend a few years as one thing, before being convinced of something else and moving on. And, at the time his RCC conversion was recounted here, he'd already moved on to something else.

Take the ex-poster child for Catholic Answers, Gerry Matatics. He certainly loved to tell his story.

Let's also not forget the infamous ongoing narccistic trainwreck, Jason Spellman.

For instance, Rose begins by showing how as a new convert to Christianity, he was already quick to ask about the problem of multiple denominations: "How had I, a newly minted Christian, come so quickly to a conclusion about which denomination taught the real truth?"

Reminds me of Joseph Smith.

They do not point to Christ---they point to a triumphal entry into the Roman Church

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