Catholicism and Protestantism's Irreconcilable Differences: Five Aspects to Discus

Catholicism and Protestantism: Five Aspects to Discus

The Irreconcilable differences between Protestantism and Catholicism: INTRODUCTION

Index

This is the Introduction to this series.

For Part II, section 1, the issue of Authority, click here.

For Part II, section 2, click here.

For Part III, How Salvation Works, click here.

For Part III, section 2, click here.

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, the highly respected scholar who passed away in 2006, was a life-long Lutheran (his parents were Lutherans) till in his last decade he converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Known as a prolific author, Church historian, and liturgical expert, he had a knack for coming up with surprising images. One such was when he wrote to describe the Protestantism as a baby in the arms of its Catholic Church mother. Kind of arresting, that image. (Maybe just a bit too Stephen King, actually.) I grew up with Protestants and would never have thought of it. Certainly it reminds me of King Lear’s famous line, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

Differences

Different children of one mother, Protestant churches – whether those founded at the time of the Reformation or those ‘calved off” (like clouds) from those first Protestant churches, (generation upon generation of calving going on, by now, 500 years of it) – are all quite different from one another. Even so, however, all of them have certain basic “genetic traits” in common, as it were.

Therefore, five basic and completely irreconcilable differences between Catholicism and Protestantism exist, and these are found throughout the Protestant “metastasisophoria”. And while individual people of both can and do convert back and forth from one to the other (and even, sometimes, back again) the churches themselves cannot negotiate away (via modern ecumenicalism) these differences. They’re foundational. Baked into the cake. Mixed in the mortar.

The Differences are…

• First Point of Difference: Authority. What is the nature of Authority in Christian life? Who has it? The Church? Which church, or what individuals or groups within which church, and so on.
• Second Point of Difference: How Salvation Works. This difference arises from the first, as Martin Luther (and the other early Reformers) came up with novel ideas about how Salvation worked, and as the Church authorities rejected them, the Reformers in turn then broke with the Church in order to keep their own ideas “in play”.
• Third Point of Difference: How the Bible Is Read. Reading the Bible didn’t produce the crisis with Authority and the new ideas on Salvation, as one might think from 500 years of Protestant propaganda. Instead, the crisis in Authority resulted as a consequence of the new ideas; i.e., Luther read the Bible in such a way as to have it validate his own already-formed ideas about how Salvation works, rather than he himself somehow discovering how Salvation worked “locked away” or “hidden” in the Bible. (Protestants would strenuously disagree with this, as their whole program relies on it, but more more on that in the appropriate place.)
• Fourth Point of Difference: Church. What is it? What’s it for? Is it visible or invisible, an institution in history or a mystical body that history doesn’t record, but can only hint at.
• Fifth Point of Difference: The Rate of Change. Since its inception, Protestantism has been on an arc of change, dynamic, far-springing, ever-leaping change that steadily takes if farther and farther away from its Mother, Catholicism; and in all of its history, no Protestant Church ever evolved backward toward Catholicism, but always farther and farther away from it. By its very nature, then, it is irreconcilable with a Faith that is built upon a Rock, Unchanging, although ever manifesting itself anew in each age it finds itself in, but never changing doctrine, belief, or even (largely) its worship.

The Modern Mess Up
Now, that fifth point raises a word of caution, a warning, a caveat. And this is important, dear Reader.

• The Catholic heresy known as Modernism currently dominates the Holy Mother Church, and Pope Francis is its apogee. 
• But Modernism began among Catholic intellectuals in the later 19th century and it was energized and “idea-ized” by Protestantism, specifically the mid-19th century Protestant Tübingen School – and it consisted in large part of a relaxation of the Church’s perennially strict moral teachings – and the attempts to explain why these teachings could be changed.
• Protestantism can be said in general to have started out with the traditionally morally strict teachings, but from its beginning weakened them (Henry VIII being a classic example, or Luther’s infamous support for Phillip of Hesse, who wanted to marry one woman while still being married to another).

Also, and quite necessary for Modernism, the 19th century came saw the high tide of what’s called Higher Biblical Criticism, which was also a Protestant development (look up Historical Criticism or Adolf Harnack if you want) because Protestantism broke with the Church’s traditional interpretations of the Bible, rejecting the teaching authority of both the Living Magisterium and Sacred Tradition.

• But by doing so, the Protestants basically deflated the Bible as the sole rule of Faith for Protestants. 
• The Bible became a flat tire. 
• It could no longer carry the weight of Protestant belief. 
• Thus many “fundamentalist” churches were born; i.e., churches that rejected the more formal, more “educated” Protestantism because of its rejection of the Bible. Pentecostalism also developed at this time – the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th – and partly for the same reason. In either case, “Blind Faith” became the rule for these Churches.

Now, the Catholic Church formally rejected the attempts of Catholic Modernists to import all this unwanted Faith-killing misery into Mother Church, culminating in 1907 with several formal “smack-downs” of Modernism by Pope St. Pius X. But the movement, like various denizens of the order of Blattodea, survived “underground” to fight another day. In fact, they survived to take over the Church herself, beginning with the Second Vatican Council and culminating with Bergoglio.

So I’m writing here about Protestantism from a Catholic Traditionalist perspective. Jorge Bergoglio would send me in for a whipping, if not excommunication. But like Herod (“that fox”), Bergi’s days are numbered.

So in the next installment of this thread, I’ll discuss the Authority issue.

An Préachán