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Posted on 08/09/2020 7:46:24 AM PDT by MurphsLaw
We should stop trying to evangelize Protestants, some Catholics say. “Let’s get our own house clean first, before we invite our fellow Christians in,” someone commented on a recent article of mine that presented a Catholic rejoinder to a prominent Baptist theologian. Another reader argued that, rather than trying to persuade Protestants to become Catholic, we should “help each other spread God’s love in this world that seems to be falling to pieces before our eyes.” As a convert from Protestantism, actively engaged in ecumenical dialogue, I’ve heard this kind of thinking quite frequently. And it’s dead wrong.
One common argument in favor of scrapping Catholic evangelism towards Protestants is that the Catholic Church, mired in sex-abuse and corruption scandals, liturgical abuses, heretical movements, and uneven catechesis, is such a mess that it is not, at least for the moment, a place suitable for welcoming other Christians.
There are many problems with this. For starters, when has the Church not been plagued by internal crises? In the fourth century, a majority of bishops were deceived by the Arian heresy. The medieval Church suffered under the weight of simony and a lax priesthood, as well as the Avignon Papacy and the Western Schism, culminating in three men claiming, simultaneously, to be pope. The Counter-Reformation, for all its catechetical, missionary and aesthetic glories, was still marred by corruption and heresies (Jansenism). Catholicism has never been able to escape such trials. That didn’t stop St. Martin of Tours, St. Boniface, St. Francis de Sales, St. Ignatius Loyola, or St. Teresa of Calcutta from their missionary efforts.
The “Catholics clean house” argument also undermines our own theology. Is the Eucharist the “source and summit of the Christian life,” as Lumen Gentium preaches, or not? If it is, how could we in good conscience not direct other Christians to its salvific power? Jesus Himself declared: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (John 6:53) Was our Lord misrepresenting the Eucharist?
Or what of the fact that most Protestant churches allow contraception, a mortal sin? Or that Protestants have no recourse to the sacraments of penance or last rites? To claim Protestants aren’t in need of these essential parts of the Catholic faith is to implicitly suggest we don’t need them either.
* Moreover, in the generations since the Reformation, Rome has been able to win many Protestants back to the fold who have made incalculable contributions to the Church. St. John Henry Newman’s conversion ushered in a Catholic revival in England, and gave us a robust articulation of the concept of doctrinal development. The conversion of French Lutheran pastor Louis Bouyer influenced the teachings of Vatican II. Biblical scholar Scott Hahn’s conversion in the 1980s revitalized lay study of Holy Scripture.
Another popular argument in favor of limiting evangelization of Protestants involves the culture war. Catholics and theologically conservative Protestants, some claim, share significant common ground on various issues: abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, euthanasia, religious freedom, etc. Secularism, the sexual revolution, and anti-religious progressives represent an existential threat to the survival of both Catholics and Protestants, and thus we must work together, not debate one another. “Let’s hold back any criticism of them,” a person commenting on my article wrote. “Believe me, in the times that we are in, we need to all hang together, or we will definitely hang separately on gallows outside our own churches.”
This line of thought certainly has rhetorical force: we don’t have the luxury of debating with Protestants when the progressivists are planning our imminent demise! Ecumenical debate is a distraction from self-preservation. One problem with this argument is that it reduces our Christian witness to a zero-sum game – we have to focus all our efforts on fighting secular progressivism, or we’ll fail. Yet the Church has many missions in the public square – that Catholics invest great energy in the pro-life movement doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also focus our efforts on other important matters: health-care, education, ensuring religious freedom, or fighting poverty and environmental degradation. All of these, in different ways, are a part of human flourishing. Even if we consider some questions more urgent than others, none of them should be ignored.
Besides, there is a vast difference between mere polemics and charitable, fruitful discussions aimed at resolving disagreements. The former can certainly cause bad blood. The latter, however, can actually foster unity and clarity regarding our purposes. Consider how much more fruitful our fight against the devastation of the sexual revolution would be if we persuaded Protestants that they need to reject things like contraception and the more permissive stance towards divorce that they have allowed to seep into their churches. Consider how non-Christians could learn from charitable ecumenical conversations that don’t devolve into name-calling and vilification.
Finally, abandoning or minimizing the evangelizing of Protestants is to fail to recognize how their theological and philosophical premises have contributed to the very problems we now confront. As Brad Gregory’s book The Unintended Reformation demonstrates, the very nature of Protestantism has contributed to the individualism, secularism, and moral relativism of our age. A crucial component to our Catholic witness, then, is helping Protestants to recognize this, since even when they have the best intentions, their very paradigm undermines their contributions to collaborating with us in the culture war.
I for one am very grateful that Catholics – many of them former Protestants – persuaded me to see the problems inherent to Protestantism, and the indisputable truths of Catholicism. My salvation was at stake. I also found and married a devout Catholic woman, and am raising Catholic children. The Catholic tradition taught me how to pray, worship, and think in an entirely different way. It pains me to think what my life would be like if I hadn’t converted to Catholicism.
Why bother to evangelize devout Protestants? Because they are people like me.
On the Lord’s Supper, it matters what you believe the spiritual is.
It doesn’t seem to mean very much to you, but Jesus explains in John 4 that God Himself is spirit.
Can you explain the “physics”of that, then? Or of how God sees and how His eyes work, versus how ours do? Or the physics of the light that the Father and the Son will provide in the New Jerusalem, or of Heaven and our glorified bodies?
It’s not nothing to participate in the Lord’s Supper in remembrance of Him, which proclaims His sacrificial death for our sake, so that we can come alive spiritually and have eternal life. To consume it unworthily is to be in unbelief, denying what He’s done for us.
And here is where what saves us is clear, too, in terms of faith and works. Our eternal life is entirely dependent on His sacrifice, as the Lord’s Supper shows. He’s our one and only food for eternal life. We don’t provide any of it.
Jesus also actually could have given His disciples something of His actual body and blood to consume at the Last Supper, but He didn’t.
After the unbelieving left, Jesus then explained to His disciples that it was His words that mattered, as they believed Him.
Or in other words, why should I believe YOUR personal interpretation of Scripture?
Give me some reason besides “Because Rome says so.”
Oh, and Catholicism didn’t even HAVE a Bible until after Martin Luther’s death.
So you need someone to try to get you to recognize obvious truth?
Are there any Protestants or even any Catholics here who didn’t think your talk of “40,000 versions of His truth” regarding Protestants didn’t mean denominations?
And what else could you have been referring to, especially since you didn’t feel the need to specify what it was, if not denominations, and it clearly wasn’t individual Protestants either?
You also didn’t seem to read the article I linked to, though it’s from the National Catholic Register. You wouldn’t have repeated the “40,000 versions of the truth” claim if you had.
And while the secular world takes it too far, so that post-modern academics have sometimes even claimed that language is so personal that any objectivity is impossible and words are basically meaningless, there is a personal element to our understanding.
Among faithful believers here a supernatural level of unity in and through Christ can be reached, and especially was in the original church, down to them sharing all things, but perfect unity among all believers will only come in the next world.
On differences in doctrine, many denominations are still unified on the fundamentals. And all things considered, I have to think that as the church has grown and developed and interacted with the world over many centuries now that denominations have a role to play in God’s plan. While there is still much supernatural unity among Christians, having faithful denominations with slightly different beliefs as well as apostate denominations allows those who refuse Christ to make their excuses for doing so, as they similarly do when they say Christians are just hypocrites, or to expose themselves as apostates.
And as God has done new things throughout this world’s existence, I believe one was the Protestant Reformation which would lead to many believers reading and studying His Word, becoming like Mary, Martha’s sister, to sit at Jesus’ feet and learn from Him.
It seems that so many FR Catholics have no CLUE as to what is actually IN their catechism!
Must have been playing hooky (oops - HOCKEY) like Mark17!
The first pope wrote that???!!!
"One indeed is the universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved, in which the priest himself is the sacrifice, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine; the bread (changed) into His body by the divine power of transubstantiation, and the wine into the blood, so that to accomplish the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from His (nature) what He Himself received from ours."
--Pope Innocent III and Lateran Council IV (A.D. 1215)
"We are compelled in virtue of our faith to believe and maintain that there is only one holy Catholic Church, and that one is apostolic. This we firmly believe and profess without qualification. Outside this Church there is no salvation and no remission of sins, the Spouse in the Canticle proclaiming: 'One is my dove, my perfect one. One is she of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her' (Canticle of Canticles 6:8); which represents the one mystical body whose head is Christ, of Christ indeed, as God. And in this, 'one Lord, one faith, one baptism' (Ephesians 4:5). Certainly Noah had one ark at the time of the flood, prefiguring one Church which perfect to one cubit having one ruler and guide, namely Noah, outside of which we read all living things were destroyed… We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff."
--Pope Boniface VIII, Bull Unam sanctam (A.D. 1302)
Again the priest refutes Scripture with the Roman catechism. We know which he holds in higher esteem
No; THE basic stuff was posted at #191
Because before that only priests could read and interpret scripture for the masses. Romans are still threatened when their people study Scripture - they might just stumble across the Truth
Well; I'm learning from the best.
It's well on it's way!
Haven't you read the discussion over these numbers up thread?
Who?
Mark 7:26-27
26. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
27. "First let the children eat all they want," he told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."
As opposed to the 20,000 Roman sects? the secadventists the latin only group, the prevatican II grouo, the ordain women group, the LGBT loving group, the Jesuits, the Franciscans, etc.... as ebb tide loves to point out all the division in your “one” church”. And it appears gay marriage, abortion, idol worship etc are all sanctioned by the Roman church as priests practice and allow this all the way up to your Pachamama worshipping pope. Hypocrite much?
Actually the Catholic Bible was co-opted from Luther by Rome.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/3558019/posts?page=213#213
Ping to bb because it was her comment.
It seems like it was about 5 years ago now, but there was a guy I was debating a bit with, on a thread like this. I was getting on him, asking him why he was interpreting scripture, without a priest to do that for him. He said he didn’t interpret scripture. He just read it, and told me what it said. The laughter was heard around the world. I still laugh about it. 🤣😆
http://biblehub.com/text/1_corinthians/10-4.htm
1 Corinthians 10:1-4 For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock (petra) that followed them, and the Rock (petra) was Christ.
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