Protestantism and the Bible
November 8, 2013
WHEN discussing matters of faith with Catholics, Protestants often attest to their superior devotion to and understanding of the Bible. It is unquestionable that the average Protestant spends more time reading, studying and memorizing the Bible than the average Catholic. Unfortunately, this reading is selective and Protestants of various sects routinely deny things that are said in the Bible. Thus the true Catholic, though he reads the Bible less, possesses a superior understanding of the Bible. This is because he is not only guided by what the Bible actually says, he is guided by the deposit of faith and more than 2,000 years of authoritative interpretation of the Bible. The Bible refutes major beliefs held by Bible-reading Protestants:
The Bible teaches that man is not justified by faith alone.
The Bible teaches Mary’s Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity and Assumption into Heaven; and the importance of venerating Mary.
The Bible teaches the existence of Purgatory.
The Bible teaches that Jesus made Peter the first pope.
The Bible teaches that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist.
The Bible teaches confession to a priest.
The Bible teaches veneration of saints.
The Bible teaches infant baptism.
— Comments —
Jewel writes:
This is a topic near and dear to my heart. I went through many iterations of Protestantism before I became a Catholic this year. I started out in a very small sect of fundamentalists who believed they were the Restored New Testament Church of Christ. This sect holds that denominations are evil, and they don’t consider themselves a denomination. Even if another denomination were teaching the same doctrines as theirs, they would be outside the ‘church’ as they consider it. Oddly enough, they believe that Christ restored the church in 1831, so for 1800 years there has effectively been no true church. I left this little cult and joined a charismatic church in the late 1970s, and when I couldn’t display any charismatic gifts like healing and speaking in tongues, I left, discouraged. I didn’t go to a church regularly until 1988, when I attended an evangelical church. At some point, they fractured over modern music and theological differences. This always seems to happen with Protestant churches. I attended a Presbyterian church, and then a house church. It was the house church experience that drew me to Catholicism.
Having been told my whole life that Catholicism was a perversion of the faith, and that it was the Great Whore of Babylon, I started looking into the claims made against it, and after a good nine months of looking, I became a Catholic.
The gifts given by the Catholic Church to humanity, and the debt the world owes the Church is huge.
Far from discouraging the reading of scriptures (which weren’t widely available 2000 years ago to a largely illiterate populace) They were and are spoken at every Mass. Large swathes of scripture are heard at each Mass: The OT, The Psalms, The NT and the Gospel. Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing through the word of God.
There are many more defenses I could make about my new faith, but I will close with this:
I have a little sister who believes that God is telling her to do things that are against her best interests. She got this belief that God can talk to you from a Pentecostal sect that teaches such things – precisely because they have interpreted the Bible as saying it – never mind the context – that is what they believe. And she is homeless and starving. All because God told her to fast for 40 days. Like Jesus. I cannot for the life of me persuade her that she is wrong. She quotes scripture at me to prove her point. You see the problem with Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide?
Sam writes:
You write: “Thus the true Catholic, though he reads the Bible less, possesses a superior understanding of the Bible.”
As a convert to Catholicism from evangelical Protestantism, I could not agree with this more. The superiority of the Catholic understanding of the Bible over the Protestant babble of conflicting interpretations of the Bible is a practical demonstration of traditionalism. It demonstrates the superiority of traditional hierarchical societies over egalitarian societies. Allow me to explain.
At any given Catholic mass, there will be selected readings from the Bible. There will be readings from the Old Testament, the Epistles, and the Gospels. These readings are usually selected to be read together because they jointly underscore how the old covenant remarkably prefigures the new covenant and how the epistles and the gospels mutually illuminate each other. If you have even a cursory background knowledge of the Bible, you will experience spine-tingling demonstrations of its awesome thematic coherence on a consistent basis if you attend the Catholic mass regularly. You will come to realize that this a book that could not have possibly emerged through human artifice.
But in order to have this awesome thematic coherence explained to you, you have to adopt the attitude of a student listening to experts. You have to trust in the authority of a continuous tradition of scriptural interpretation that extends from the apostolic Church to the present. A continuous tradition that relies upon the pooled wisdom of learned saints and holy men. A wisdom that knows how to select the salient excerpts out of a vast body of writings and join them together so as to demonstrate spiritual truths.
In my experience, this compares so favorably to the Protestant approach to the Bible that it constitutes a practical refutation of it. Quite literally, the structure of the Mass itself refutes Protestantism.
I cannot tell you how many Bible studies I have been to, as a Protestant, that consisted of the following: Some charismatic figure “proof texts” some purely denominational and idiosyncratic interpretation of one book of the Bible, and proceeds to project that interpretation upon the rest of the Bible in its entirety. Calvinists start with Romans 9 and work backwards from there, pitting that verse against all of the other verses that logically imply free will and moral responsibility; Liberals do the exact same, pitting the fact that Jesus isn’t recorded as explicitly condemning homosexuality against the Pauline epistles; and so on and so forth.
The problem is that Protestantism isn’t willing to learn from history. It is predicated upon the assumption that nobody really knew what the epistles meant for 1500 years, just as the liberal assumes that nobody really understood the nature of sexual morality until the mid-1960’s. And it locates the interpretational authority in the individual, the person least qualified to understand and extrapolate the meaning of the bible.
And so it is no wonder that around 52 attentive appearances at Sunday Mass will teach you more about the real meaning of the Bible than hundreds of hours spent aimlessly committing it to one’s personal memory.
Laura writes:
Brilliantly said. Both Sam and Jewel have made perceptive observations.
The Tridentine Mass, also known as the Latin Mass, which was the Catholic liturgy for hundreds of years until 1968, does not include a reading from the Old Testament, but many of the prayers in it are from the Psalms and thus it is infused with the beautiful language of the Old Testament. The Mass is the highest form of prayer and Christ’s sacrifice reenacted. It has never been intended primarily as Bible instruction, but it is a profound encounter with the Bible on many levels.
Protestantism is often portrayed as a religious movement of the book. While this is true, Catholicism is book-centered in a different and deeper way. The sacred book is so revered that it becomes a supernatural object. Not only did Catholics compile the Bible, they created masterpieces of bookcraft in the form of lectionaries, evangeliaria, missals and the Books of Hours. During the High Mass in the Extraordinary Form, the Tridentine Missal is held by a subdeacon, who becomes, in the words of the German writer Martin Mosebach, a human book-rest. It is also venerated with incense. Mosebach writes in his book The Heresy of Formlessness:
One finds bindings that are like miniature architectural structures; constructed of expensive materials and decorated with carved figures, they resemble holy relics reposing in ostensories. The Missal becomes a tiny cathedral in which, opening it, one enters.
Strange, how Protestants complain that Catholics have never read the Bible. A typical Book of Hours contained excerpts from the four gospels, in addition to prayers and psalms. Here is a page from the 15th century Hours of Catherine of Cleves.
Sam responds to Laura:
I agree that the Latin Mass is superior to the Novus Ordo on almost every single metric that matters. But this serves to strengthen my point rather than weaken it. My point is is that the Catholic approach to the Bible yields an effortless understanding of it, while the Protestant approach simply multiplies confusion upon confusion. If someone were to read the Bible attentively on a semi-regular basis and attend Novus Ordo masses at their parish, they would still understand the Bible better than the typical Protestant who spends hours upon hours memorizing verses and proof texts.
And this is without the visual and palpably demonstrable representation of Christ’s sacrifice that one is confronted with in the Latin Mass. This makes it even more salient that the “Protestantized” Novus Ordo mass is superior in its teaching of Biblical truth to the absurd individualism of Protestant Christianity, even in its so-called “orthodox” or “confessional” forms.
Vicky Hassessian
I wanted to thank you for your article Protestantism and the Bible. I am a convert to the Catholic Church as of Easter Vigil 2008. For 55 years I was involved in various Protestant churches, some fundamentalist, some evangelical, some both and some very bland. It has been a long journey, but I finally feel like I am home! The one thing I have struggled with is that when one is a Protestant, one can look for a church that agrees with one’s own interpretation of Scripture and know that most everyone in the church feels the same way about most things. However, I have found that in the Catholic Church, though we are blessed to all be worshipping under one roof as Catholics, there is a very wide variety of feelings on many different subjects, even in the various teachings of different priests! I have learned that I have to be very careful whom I listen to and to weigh the many things I hear from others by Holy Scripture and the Catechism. It certainly keeps me on my toes!
I so appreciate the different sites that you provided so that we can peruse them and get good, solid teaching on the subjects that divide the Protestant and Catholic churches. The Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed we are pretty much in agreement with (the Protestants would bicker about communion of saints, but that’s another story). I will download this information so that in times of weakness and when I am discouraged from the teaching I am getting, that I can look to this as to how the Church really wants it’s children to be taught.
Laura writes:
Thank you for writing.
One important thing to bear in mind is that the fundamental doctrines of the Church can never be changed. So if you hear someone, or read something, disputing or denying what was believed by the Church for thousands of years, you know you are encountering a falsehood.
Leo Walker writes:
Two things:
1. The Protestant approach to the Scriptures has often appeared to me as a form of bibliolatry, paying more honor and reverence to the text of God’s revelation to man than to the God Who is revealing Himself.
2. Protestant worship services, and I’ve attended a wide variety of them from Episcopalian to Pentecostal to Flaming Fundamentalist to insipid mainstream, always come across as deficient. They all seem to lack depth, breadth or any connection, or even any attempt to connect to, the mystery of God present and active in their midst. Even those churches that seem most spiritually alive give me the impression that God is a kind of technology to be invoked rather than a Person to be adored and loved and loved by.
End of two cents.
John writes:
As a Protestant would like to express disagreement with view that faith alone does not save, that good works are necessary for salvation too. At the same time, I would like to take issue with the suggestion that we Protestants don’t think that good works are vital to the Christian faith.
The plainest statement is Scripture on the relationship between faith and works is Ephesians 2:8-9: “For by grace you have been saved by faith: and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as the result of works, that no one should boast.”
The Book of James indeed states that “faith without works is dead,” but that in no way contradicts Ephesians. James’ point is that “faith” that doesn’t give one the heart to do good works isn’t genuine saving faith, but mere lip service. Works indeed are important, for as Christ said, “By their fruits you will know them.”
The point, as expressed by Paul in Ephesians, is that as Christians we don’t do good works to get saved; we do good works because we are saved. Or to use an illustration from Martin Luther, a pear tree produces pears not to become a pear tree, but because it is a pear tree.
To think we can save ourselves by works is indeed sinful boasting. Works outside of faith are “filthy rags,” as Paul called them. Knowing that salvation is a gift from God through faith properly humbles us–as well as taking away our fear. If we believe that we must do works to be saved, how can we as deluded sinners ever know whether we’ve done enough of them to make the grade of salvation?
Finally, we know from Scripture that true faith alone can bring salvation, as was the case with the repentant thief on the cross next to Christ. This man who led a wicked life had no good works to offer God, only a contrite spirit and faith. Christ said to him, “This day you will be with me in Paradise.”
Mary writes:
1 Corinthians 13: 1-2-12 – “If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity [love], I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing…And now there remain faith, hope and charity [love], these three: but the greatest of these is charity [love].”
John wrote: “To think we can save ourselves by works is indeed sinful boasting.”
Catholics believe that they are saved not by works but by God’s grace alone. Through God’s sanctifying grace we receive the gifts of faith, hope and charity. In the Catholic view, faith stands alone as a virtue and acts in concert with the other two. Hope, perhaps less obviously, displays our child-like confidence that God will indeed fulfill his promise to us. All three are needed for salvation.
I have heard the tree analogy used in a different sense, with faith as the root; hope the trunk; and charity, or love, the fruit. If the root and the trunk don’t produce fruit they are without value. The life of God comes into us through faith, through us by hope, and out of us through charity or love. Man consists of body and soul. If faith is an act of the intellect willing a soul’s commitment to God, acts of charity, or love, are the body’s expression of that commitment; hope lives in God’s promise to give man eternal life in heaven and the means to obtain it. The three cannot be separated. Protestants appear to use the word faith in the broader sense of including all three virtues, but the famous Corinthians passages above support the distinction, the Catholic position, very clearly.
John wrote: “If we believe that we must do works to be saved, how can we as deluded sinners ever know whether we’ve done enough of them to make the grade of salvation?”
Catholicism has a supernatural component that is unavailable to Protestants. Catholics are given the means, through Holy Mass and reception of the sacraments, to remain in (or return to) the state of grace necessary for eternal life in heaven. Free access to the sacraments gives us the confidence to strive to live a life that is pleasing to God while remaining hopeful and desirous of heaven. Two thousand years of Catholic doctrine clearly lays out what is necessary; we take nothing for granted. Presumption – “the condition of a soul that, because of a badly regulated reliance on God’s mercy and power, hopes for salvation without doing anything to deserve it, or for pardon of his sins without repenting of them” – is a great sin.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Laura writes:
The idea that man is justified by faith alone is at the heart of Protestant thinking. In his footnotes on The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange writes:
Luther went so far as to say: ™ Pecca fortiter et crede firmius: sin mightily and believe more mightily still; you will be saved. ‘ Not that Luther intended thereby to exhort men to sin; it was merely an emphatic way of saying that good works are useless for salvation — that faith in Christ alone suffices. He says, truly enough (Works, Weimar edition, XII, 559 (1523) ), that if you believe, good works will follow necessarily from your faith. ‘ But as Maritain justly observes (Notes sur Luther; appendix to the second edition of Trois Reformateurs), ‘ in his thought these good works follow from salutary faith as a sort of epiphenomenon. ‘ Moreover, the charity which will follow this faith is the love of our neighbor rather than the love of God. And thus the notion of charity is degraded, emptied gradually of its supernatural and God-ward content and made equivalent to works of mercy. In any case, it remains true that for Luther a man is justified simply by faith in Christ, even though the sin is not blotted out by the infusion of charity, or the supernatural love of God.
Mary writes:
“And thus the notion of charity is degraded, emptied gradually of its supernatural and God-ward content and made equivalent to works of mercy.”
This is an important point. In Catholicism charity is not used in its common meaning of helping the poor; it is much more profound than that. It is interchangeable with love and is the queen of all virtues. It is the principal virtue through which we are united in love with God and hence do all we can to please Him by loving our neighbor. To misunderstand or degrade the true role of charity in our salvation is to misunderstand true union with God.
God promised to give us the means to salvation. Through the profound and merciful wisdom of Christ’s Church our souls are bestowed with the gifts of faith, hope and charity, which are needed to live a life pleasing to God. Hope, an often forgotten virtue, is a component of real love and is necessary for salvation – but doesn’t exclude reasonable fear for the loss of our soul. But Luther never rested in the peace of God’s promises. He lacked the virtue of hope because he suffered from a paralyzing level of scrupulosity, which he attempted to salve with his teaching of sola fide, among other things. What he did instead was to create an insurmountable breach between himself and any real love, hope and confidence in God and His mercy, for sola fide deemphasizes, and thereby degrades, these essential virtues. The sad irony of Luther’s teaching is that as he attempted to grasp the peace and salvation that eluded him, he showed no hope or holy confidence in God’s promises to us, thereby displaying his lack of faith (and hope, and charity).
Mary adds:
In the profound and merciful wisdom of Christ’s Church, through sanctifying grace gained by Baptism, our souls are bestowed with the gifts of faith, hope and charity, which are needed to live a life pleasing to God.
