Tim Enloe has raised a very good point about the care that Protestant apologists should take in representing the Catholic faith to others. In short, we ought never to maintain that official Roman Catholic teaching affirms what it plainly denies, or vice versa. In other words, apologetics ought never be a battle with a straw man. The warning is a good one, and there are many who are involved in Protestant/Catholic polemics who should take it to heart and, as Tim pointed out, this would include Catholic apologists who misrepresent the official Protestant position.
With all this granted, and in the spirit of this admonition, I think we need to take this to the next level. We have to take even greater care to compare like to like. In order to do this, we have to ask where the misrepresentations actually come from. And, having answered the question, we have ask if it really is a misrepresentation at every level. And this takes us into the matter of corporate testimony.
Take the standard evangelical chesnut that Roman Catholics believe they are saved by works and not by grace. Where does this come from? There is no disputing that this is a standard assumption among evangelical Protestants, but where does it arise? What is the source of it? I do not believe that this is widely believed because some cult-buster Protestant apologist was reading through the catechism of the Catholic church, found that they attribute our salvation to the grace of God, and then said to himself, “That won’t sell to my radio audience! I’ll have to change it!”
No, I believe the real source of this widespread “distortion” of the official position of the RCC is from Catholics themselves, and they come to us in two kinds. First, the evangelical Protestant world has a multitude of ex-Catholics in our midst. I am a pastor of a conservative Reformed church, and we have numerous former Catholics in our congregation — a lot of them. When you talk to these people about their background and upbringing, certain features jump out. One positive thing would be gratitude for the teaching that caused them to fear God, and to respect holy things. But on the down side, there is a very common response of having felt distant from God, of having to earn approval from Him, and of having had no practical understanding of grace. I have one of the best church secretaries in the Western hemisphere, and when some of us have commented on how efficient she is, one of her joking responses has been to attribute it to “that Catholic guilt.” Now there are a lot of these people in our midst, and it does not take much to figure out what makes the rest of us conclude that the RCC is a place where “works righteousness” is taught. This is a constant refrain we hear from the steady stream of ecclesiastical refugees. This is not an incidental point.
Second, evangelicals are all about sharing their faith, and this has resulted, over the years, in numerous conversations with rank and file Catholics. These were not debates with the monsignor over what the official position was, but rather with pew Catholics over what made them tick. And many of us have heard the same kind of thing in those settings.
Now I know that the official Catholic position does not deny the possibility of a “personal relationship with God through Christ.” Nor do I deny that there are practicing Catholics who have such a relationship. But I am affirming that there is something about how the RCC is set up that has caused a major disconnect between these elements of their official position, and what the rank and file believe. And as a confessional Protestant, I believe that what that “something” is would be other elements of the official RCC position. If we take incarnational theology seriously, the official position is what the people are actually doing.
Allow me to assert something else important here. I write this as an evangelical, and as someone who is confessionally Reformed. But this is not written in a partisan spirit, because I am fully aware of how these same dynamics of “disconnect” are at play in the Protestant world. I don’t believe they are at the same levels (yet), but they are certainly there in disconcerting ways. And when we see examples of such a disconnect in our own ranks, the response should be to assume responsibility ourselves, renew our commitment to police our own ranks and not to blame outsiders who draw the wrong conclusions. This is what it means to have a good testimony.
For example, our church has been in a very public battle for the last three years with the intoleristas in our community, and this battle has been conducted on many fronts. In this controversy, different kinds of outsiders are looking at us, and drawing conclusions about what we are all about, what we are teaching and doing and saying. Now this is what I mean by corporate testimony. We are in a small town, and there are hundreds of us. These hundreds of people have an identity that is associated with us, and (in my view) the vast majority of them have a good testimony with those who are outside. But it also has to be confessed that a handful of our kirkers (as we call them) have gone out there and (I say this with deep affection for every bone in their heads) and done some idiotic things. When this happens, it happens in front of two kinds of outsider — our enemies who are eager for any new material, and then the people who don’t really have a dog in the fight, but who are curious. Their only contact with us is through the individual from our ranks who, for some reason, has decided to step out, high, wide and handsome. “Huh,” they think. “What is Wilson preaching on over there?”
It does no good to complain about this because this is how God made the world. Never argue with gravity. This is precisely why the apostle Paul was so eager to urge Christians to walk in a manner that was worthy of the calling they had received. Oursiders will look at us, and render general by induction. If a sufficient number of outsiders have the same experience, the induction will become proverbial. When that happens, it does no good at all to point to a piece of paper.
Put another way, our respective confessions of faith are worth something only when they are lived out in practical ways, and result in a lived out commitment to holiness, kindness, love, and justice. In the realm of abstractions, in a classrom, sketched out on the blackboard, I would be happy to pit the Westminster Confession of Faith against the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But that, by itself, is an academic exercise, and if it happens in the classroom only, it does not matter who wins the debate. The task of all ministry is to get the truth of the grace of God into the lives of the people of God.
In the discussion of what it means to be a genuine Christian, and what it means to be a member of the holy, catholic, and apostolic church, neither side should be allowed to “retreat to the catechism.” We as Protestants embrace our catechisms, but this embrace is only legitimately seen and evaluated in our lives, incarnationally. In other words, do our people glorify God and are they enjoying Him on the threshold of forever?
This principle relates to a common critique of Protestants, which is that we don’t have a real sense of respect for hierarchy and authority. But as we examine all this, we have to remember we are not dealing with a paper battle between what the Westminster Standards say about ministerial authority and what the Catholic magisterium says about it. In both cases there, we have high views of ecclesiastical authority. They differ, but they do not differ on the reality of that authority.
But if we have learned this lesson of the absolute need for application, the need to deny any distance between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, we will view this question differently. We will not ask, “Where is obedience taught?” We will ask, “Where is obedience practiced?” Now where it is practiced, it will no doubt be taught, but where it is taught, it is not necessarily practiced. So we are talking about how ecclesiastical authority is played out in real life. What is the incarnational manifestation of it?
Another aside before I make this next point. I have been (and will continue to be) a rather severe critic of numerous winds of doctrine in the contemporary evangelical church. I believe many of these contemporary movements represent one bad disaster after another, and are simply our Protestant form of going to semi-Pelagian seed. When Protestants drifted away from their original high Augustinianism, it was only a matter of time before the folly of man-centered religion began manifesting itself in bizarre ways. This has happened before, when the medieval church drifted away from its high Augustinianism. I believe this drifting is the ultimate source of the disconnect between lip service to grace in the documents and practical sense that “it’s all up to me” in the day to day business of living our lives. Some efforts at self-salvation will be examples of a dignified “high piety” (going to mass every day) while others will be openly narcisstic (soaking up the therapy speak of the contemporary evangelical church). But all of it represents neglect of the overflowing grace of God.
So back to views of hierarchy. As a minister in a confessional Reformed church, I have a congregation that insists on substantive sermons from the Scriptures, and the congregation is devoted in its attempts to live out what is taught. There is a high level of commitment to the Scriptures, and as we teach certain things as biblically necessary, I do not see a vast disconnect. And when there is a disconnect, we seek to provide pastoral counsel and help. For example, we teach that parents are responsible for the godly education of their children, and we have near universal application of this through homeschooling and Christian schools. There are other examples, but we believe that there must be a high correlation between what we say we believe and what we actually do. But with all this, we do not have certain formal marks of church authority. I don’t wear a collar, don’t go by “the Rev.”, and so on.
Compare this what has to be described as the adamant teaching of the RCC, and what is actually lived out. Remember the issue is incarnation here, not paper. To take one striking example, I really don’t really think that a discussion of commitment to ecclesiastical authority is complete unless we include in that discussion the question of how many American Catholics practice birth control. This is like the two boys in the parable; one says he will go and doesn’t, and the other says he won’t and goes. In the world of incarnational living, nothing is more apparent than the fact that what the RCC says is necessary is disregarded by rank and file Catholics as unnecessary.
What does all this mean for the task of apologetics across the Roman Catholic/confessional Protestant divide? I believe that simplistic Protestant apologists ought not to be grandstanding for the audience in the cheap seats. “Did you know that Catholics believe that the sacraments are necessary for salvation?” “What! No! Booo!” The problem here is that the Westminster Catechism asks how the sacraments are made effectual means of salvation. Now what? To play to the nickel seats this way simply reinforces some of our problems with baptistic individualism, which are not insignificant. At the same time, there is a nuanced understanding of incarnational theology that makes this a legitimate point. But I do not make the point as one who taunts. This is a problem created by the sinful human heart, not by the pope in Rome, and it is evident in our circles as well. But when it is evident in our circles we confessional Protestants need to be resolved to deal with it in an incarnational way. This means dealing with it much better than Rome has.