A Reflection on Modernism and Protestantism

Modernism is Protestant. One might say that as an ideology, it is Protestantism with the Catholic trappings removed. Catholicism is a revealed religion, descended from on high (like a few others claim to be, but most religions just sort of developed in certain ethnic peoples, over time).

And "revealed religion" is the very thing Modernism rejects. It came from German Protestants about the time Darwin was making waves, and Modernism is all about evolution. Evolution of a certain sort. There was the natural Development of Doctrine, which could be said to be a form of evolution -- but if it were, the Holy Ghost directed it slowly, steadily, over the centuries.
Protestantism wrenched that away and created the basis for "Evolution by Fiat", a intentional redirection of Doctrine based not on lived experience threaded through centuries and many, many individuals, but something directed by revolutionaries with "novel" doctrines. (The very idea of Sola Scriptura cries out for absolute novelty from every single reader of Holy Writ.) Once that began, then a new form of evolution started, actually a devolution, resulting in the basic Modernist beliefs, seen in Mainline Prot Churches and the Mainline Catholic National Language Churches, i.e. everything evolves, we evolve, morality evolves (as in our understanding of the death penalty), the Faith evolves (obviously "the spirit" of Vat 2 operates on that notion), the Church evolves structurally, and ultimately God Himself evolves.

The corporate managers running the Church today were weaned on this core bone marrow of Modernism and I suspect they really don't have a clue as to what a revealed religion really implies; certainly they don't grasp what Catholicism means. If ever I had that rock in my gut, as a friend put it, of wondering about whether the current bishops, etc., were actual Catholics, I guess I passed that (rather large) kidney stone some time ago.

An Préachán

A Deductive Argument Against Sola Scriptura...

Sola Scriptura, the Protestant argument that the Bible is the sole basis for the Faith, rather than Church or "the traditions of men", is easily enough refuted. But Protestants of course need it mightily because without it, they have no predicate for being Protestant. I mean, where do they get their authority to interpret the Bible in the first place? Did our Lord breathe on them at some point, and say, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost! Whatsoever ye declare bound on Earth shall be bound in Heaven?" (St. John 20:22-23) 

Well, actually, Calvin seems to have thought he was a prophet or new apostle, or so I understand. (I remember hearing that somewhere, but Calvinists don't broadcast it, much like Luther's many versions of "Logic is the devil's whore" or "the Christian must pluck out reason from his mind as one plucks out an eye.") 

Were I ever in a formal debate with Protestants, that's the first question I would ask. "Where do you get the authority to teach – anything?" They'd have to refer to Sola Scriptura, or go home. 

While various Bible verses have been used in varying degrees to argue for Sola Scriptura, it is usually 2 Timothy 3:15-16 that is invoked. It reads, starting with verse 14: "4 But continue thou in those things which thou hast learned, and which have been committed to thee: knowing of whom thou hast learned them; 15 And because from thy infancy thou hast known the holy scriptures, which can instruct thee to salvation, by the faith which is in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice," (The relevant section I've bolded and italicized) 

This version is the Douay-Rheims. This following are verses 15 & 16 from the New International Version: "...And how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...".

Pretty close, the two versions. The Catholic version says "profitable" where the Protestant version has "useful", The Catholic version has "can instruct thee to salvation" whereas the Protestant one has the more colorful "make you wise for salvation." The Greek I have, too. 

In any event, nowhere do these verses suggest that Scripture alone is what salvation or the Faith in general, are based on. And in other places, St. Paul writes (2 Thessalonians 2:15):  "So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter."

Such a passage obviously undercuts any Sola "Scriptura" idea. But my deductive argument against Sola Scriptura is based on 1 Timothy 3:15 which reads in the NIV: "If I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth." Call me an unreformed type, but I like the Douay-Rheims English better: "But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."

Anyway, here's the deductive argument. Premise one (major premise): 1 Timothy 3:15 shows that St. Paul the wordsmith capability, the phrasing, words, grammar, etc., to have written "If I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the Scripture of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth."

Premise two (minor premise): In all of the vast corpus of Pauline text, the "Apostle to the Gentiles" does not in fact write any such passage, not remotely, as shown so well in 2 Timothy 3:15-16. 

Conclusion: St. Paul did not in fact communicate any such idea because he did not want to. He had the ability, and the space, but he didn't. It was not his teaching.

Simple. 

We hardly need get into the demented inbreeding of First-order logic (a.k.a. predicate logic, quantificational logic, and the so whimsically named "first-order predicate calculus" or its papa (or would it be "mama"?) propositional logic (also called symbolic logic and Our Lord only knows what else), to conclude St. Paul had means and opportunity to "do the deed" regarding Sola Scriptura, but not the motive. 

He wasn't a Protestant.

An Préachán

Protestant - Muslim intellectual links, an interesting speculation

Amici,

One of the problems Catholics have traditionally had when arguing with Protestants is that they are not – to put it politely, very logically consistent. Many examples exist, but their answers to how the Canon of Scripture was worked out and their defense of Sola Scriptura both come to mine, not to mention the problems raised by their various interpretations of Sola Fide in every day life and in theological questions of great import. 

Often times, I don't think our Protestant friends really do bother with answering those questions. Or rather, should one, as a Protestant, be inclined to ponder them in the first place, then one might very well find oneself becoming a Catholic! So, whence comes this tendency to avoid rationality in regards to Faith? To begin this meditation, let me quote Protestantism's founder: in one of his debates, Luther, brought up short by logical argument, shouted, "Logic is the Devil's whore!"

I guess Protestantism has carried that "genetic trait" down the generations. Or to put it another way, the Medieval Nominalists who were the precursors of Protestantism weren't too big on logic, either. They rejected Aquinas as being too rational, and they in fact rejected human rationality – at least when it came to things religious. I suppose they either re-created or were influenced by the strain in Islamic thought that had produced the Al-Asherites, and today the Wahabi-Salafist school of Muslim theology. These rejected/reject the idea that human thought can know anything of God, and that all we can know of God is of revelation – in fact, they were/are quite extreme that even any science, chemistry, biology, etc., is blasphemous, because it plumbs the mind of God.

So, with that background in Islam, and the influence of certain Medieval Muslims in Christianity (there was a flowering of Aristotle in the High Middle Ages, partly because of Aristotle's works translated from Arabic), I would guess that some of the Al-Asherite/Salafist sort of thinking came in, as well, with tracts and excerpts of actual Muslim thinkers being translated, not just Aristotle. The parallels between certain aspects of Protestantism and Islam are just too strong for it to be coincidental, unless there's some sort of human trait (that obviously not all humans have) that produces it.

Thus we can speak of "Protestant Anti-Intellectualism" in the same way we can speak of Islamic anti-intellectualism. A great book on that latter subject is Robert R. Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind, How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis – well worth reading for itself, and the insights it gives into the recent murderous, savage behavior by a Saudi flight student at the U.S. Naval Air Station – and all such insanity, actually – but also for the insights it provides to Catholics trying to understand Protestant "thinking".

One of my favorite Luther quotes is, "Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God." That is unadulterated, pure Al-Asherite Wahabi-Salafism. Couldn't be purer.

Anyway, some speculation, of course, but also a pondering, a meditation, but after all, we Catholics, with our long tradition, derived from the philosopher Justin Martyr and formalized by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, (died 524), famous author of The Consolation of Philosophy, who encapsulated the entire Western Christian intellectual program with his saying, "Insofar as you are able, conjoin Faith and Reason." That seems to be the antithesis of the Al-Asherites then, the Salafists today, and Protestantism from its inception. I for one know, from arguing with certain Baptists, that they are amazingly Salafist when it comes to religion, but not of course in any other field. Wahabi-Salafist Muslims extend that to all fields of human knowledge. 

An Préachán

Did 19th Century Protestant "Higher Biblical Criticism" first appear during the Reformation?

Some things never change. Protestants smashing up the Bible in the 19th century? Cutting of the limb they were sitting on (it would seem to be a classic example of that). Well, no wonder. That's what Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the rest were doing 400 years before "Modernism" began.

What thoughts occur to you when you least expect them! One can say, with the moderns, that you were subconsciously "thinking" about an issue involved over some period of time, and then, finally, it surfaces to conscious thought.

Maybe. Or maybe your Guardian Angel was able to finally get a thought into your thick skull. As for me, I'm betting the latter.

It's occurred to me that one of the pillars of "Modernism" -- that heresy gutting the Church today (and for the past 60+ years) -- specifically the pillar known as "Higher Biblical Criticism" or more vaguely "Historical Criticism", was really already going on in the Protestant Churches back in the 16th century. It would explain a lot.

•  Higher Biblical Criticism trashes out the Bible, making it a potpourri of religious writings concocted over time and that bear no real, essential relationship to spiritual reality.

This has seeped into every Christian clann. 

Like a modern Catholic, a modern Protestant is either a Progressive / Liberal, or a Fundamentalist / more conservative one, and the great dividing line is their view of the Bible. This is essential, for otherwise confusion reigns in trying to classify them. 

• A modern Protestant might be an Anglican (Episcopalian) or Calvinist (Presbyterian -- here in Hungary they're called "Kalvinist" directly) or a Lutheran: those sorts are usually Progressives. Of course, conservative "break-away" versions exist of each of these. In the U.S., the Missouri Synod Lutherans would fit that bill.
• Like ancient Gaul, one can divide the rest of the Protestant tribe into three: the serious-style worshipers who -- whatever their liturgy or lack of it -- do not go into emotionalism. (These can be "on-line" Protestant Churches of a purely Progressive belief matrix, or Fundamentalist-style groups not Progressive.)
• The Evangelicals, which in American usage are the more emotional, feel-good-style worshipers, and who often belong to "non-denominational" bodies. 
• And then the Pentecostals, who are hang-your-reason-on-the-coat-rack-when-you-come-in types. They go over into pure emotionalism and a sort of spiritual soup, and wouldn't know if they're worshiping God, Allah, the Devil, Brahma, Kali, or the Emperor of Japan.

Most of the Fundamentalists are strict "Bible Christians", meaning, in their own minds, they fully accept the inerrancy of Holy Writ; it is, to them, the Word of God and truly a case of Sola Scriptura. They're named Fundamentalists in the first place because they rebuked the 19th century Protestant Modernists, for instance, in Germany, of the Tübingen School. This rebuke was found in the English-language world in the Schofield Reference Bible (1909) and then The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.published between 1910 and 1915 and that would finally include 90 essays written by 64 authors from various denominations. 

So, in theory. the various Baptists would be more of a Fundamentalist Christian in this sense. (Mainstream Media has hopelessly over-used and confused the word "Fundamentalist" with Muslims, for instance, and so on, people who in general do violence in the name of religion. And that is no accident: it is a feature, not a bug.) But you can find Progressive Baptists, just as you find Progressive Catholics. The Progressive/Fundamentalist divide crosses every denomination. And the way to tell is to ask questions about the Bible.

And thus we come back to Holy Writ. Just as the 19th century Modernists trashed out the Bible, so did the Reformers of the 16th century. Luther, for example, is widely known to have added "alone" in German to his German-language translation of Romans 3:28, and to have wanted to excise the Epistle of James from the New Testament. In fact, Luther put James, the letter to the Hebrews, the letters of John, and the book of Revelation (my favorite NT book) into an appendix. 

Luther went on this rampage because 2 Maccabees 12:43-46 involves prayers for the dead and thus supports the doctrine of Purgatory, while Hebrews clearly embraces the existence of the priesthood, and of course James 2:24 clearly promotes the Catholic doctrine of merit -- in general, James is contra Luther in every aspect, and Luther called it "an epistle of straw".

What is less widely known is that he massively redacted the New Testament and to have re-interpreted various passages insanely badly, insisting that passages clearly supporting Faith and the necessity of Christian Charity as meaning just the opposite. People of all Christian stripes should know he left out the Apocrypha writing from the Old Testament -- but he did so because praying fore the dead appeared in 2 Maccabees, for instance.

But what dawned on me was that all that Protestant reinterpretation of the Bible to mean what no one in the previous millennium and a half of Christianity thought it meant was -- fundamentally (to coin a phrase) -- the first appearance of "Higher Biblical Criticism". What is Higher Criticism but an assertion that "We know what this means, YOU don't!" Isn't that what Luther said? And isn't that what the early Mondernists, such as Ferdinand Christian Baur (d. December 1860), founder and leader of the Tübingen School (i.e., University of Tübingen) down to Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976) and his demythologizing" of the Bible. 

(Other names of "this ilk" include: Ernest Renan (d. 1892), Adolf von Harnack (d. 1930), and in Catholicism: Alfred Loisy, and so on. You know, down to Pope Francis.)

So, honestly, "trashing" out the Bible goes a long way back, and seems anchored -- by no means wholly. but in a large degree -- in the restless German soul. 

But more basic than that, Protestantism is a manifestation in church internationalism of Modernism and Bible trashing. 

Interesting.

An Préachán