I happen to be a Catholic who converted from Protestantism of the Episcopalian/High Anglican variety after spending my early years mostly unchurched. My lapsed parents' backgrounds were Southern Baptist on my mother's side and Methodist on my father's. When I finally felt called to worship God at about age 40, I found my way to an Episcopal congregation, thanks to the help of a friend. Later, another friend introduced me to Catholicism — or, re-introduced me, since I had learned much about the faith as a student at Georgetown in the '60's — at a time when I had become personally dissatisfied with Anglicanism. I underwent the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and was confirmed as a Roman Catholic in 1995.
I now, to some inner surprise, find my religious journey has left me bewildered by some of the matters raised by Mr. Beckwith and others, in the wake of his conversion.
Mr. Beckwith writes in his blog post:
... I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries. Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it. Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.
To be quite honest, I don't follow all of that. The prose is a bit turgid ... and the basic Protestant-Catholic controversy over justification — God's act of declaring or making a sinner righteous before God — is one I simply don't think deserves all the ink it has been given over the centuries since the Protestant Reformation.
Of course, I get why justification is crucial in Christianity. It's a no-brainer, the idea that God and sin can't share the same "space" in heaven, so the fact that each of us humans is a sinner, even post-Crucifixion, has to be offset or overcome somehow.
I also understand that Martin Luther believed in sola fide, justification by faith alone, when in 1517 he challenged (per Wikipedia) "the Roman Catholic practice of indulgences for penance, and for that reason it [sola fide] is called the material cause of the Protestant Reformation, while the doctrine of sola scriptura is considered the formal cause."
Sola scriptura as a Protestant doctrine basically holds that Sacred Scripture — the Holy Bible — does not need interpreting by church teaching that takes place in the context of Sacred Tradition.
Sacred Tradition is the continuing, post-biblical elaboration of Christian understanding and doctrine reflected in the dogma of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches — Christian churches that adhere to the apostolic succession (the unbroken line of bishops beginning with the original apostles). It is the apostolic succession which is said to justify those churches in so extending Christian dogma from time to time.
The Catholic Church, for example, treats as dogma the ideas of papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the Mother of God — i.e., Christ — and Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven. Admittedly, that any of those three items ought to be taken as indisputable articles of faith is not obvious from reading the Bible alone. Without the elaboration of Christian understanding that is embodied in the Sacred Tradition, it would be hard to credit them.
When Mr. Beckwith writes in his blog piece:
There is a conversation in [the Evangelical Theological Society] that must take place, a conversation about the relationship between Evangelicalism and what is called the “Great Tradition,” a tradition from which all Christians can trace their spiritual and ecclesiastical paternity. It is a conversation that I welcome, and it is one in which I hope to be a participant ...
... the "Great Tradition" he refers to is that same "Sacred Tradition." I gather he feels, uncontroversially, that this tradition is rooted in the writings of the early Church Fathers. Those writings are to him a source of valid authority and purportedly show him that "the early church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible."
Today, the Catholic News Service article says, the official Catholic view of justification, as expressed in a 1999 joint declaration with Lutherans, is this:
By grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while calling us to good works.Such a formulation seems to contradict what I imagine to be an erroneous, if widespread, understanding of the Catholic position: that virtuous works can supposedly get us into heaven.
As Mr. Beckwith would have it (per the CNS article):
... "Protestants often misunderstand" what the [Catholic] church is trying to convey in its teachings on the need to be virtuous. "The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue — not because virtue saves you, but because that's the way God's grace is manifested," he said.
"Grace" is theo-speak for the notion that what God does to save us is unearned and unmerited: done out of the goodness of his heart, as it were. When we receive the free gift of salvation based on faith, it is only natural that we should respond by feeling called to perform "good works." This is what the Catholic Church actually teaches.
According to the Wikipedia sola fide article:
Protestants have historically summarized their view with the formula: "Justification is by faith alone, but not by the faith that is alone [that is, not by a supposed faith that has no accompanying works]."
It accordingly seems to me that there isn't a dime's worth of difference here! Catholics and Protestants actually believe the same thing!
True, that doesn't defuse the issues surrounding the Protestant sola scriptura outlook, which boils down to the question of whether any Church, Catholic or otherwise, has teaching authority beyond what the Bible "says," all by itself. I freely admit that that sounds to me as if it is but a purely formal controversy — as long as what the Church teaches is in harmony with what sola scriptura advocates substantively hold, anyway.
Is there anything about crediting the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption that leaves any of us in a different place, in terms of how we lead a properly Christian life? If so, my Protestant friends, I'd like to know what it is.
Or, take the disagreement over the true nature of the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Whether, or how, Christ is "really" present "in" the Eucharistic elements seems to me less important than that they bring us all to share one table with the Lord. For us to fall out over the precise nature of the items on the menu has to be just plain wrong.
The fault, I recognize, is on both (or all) sides. For reasons I don't understand, we Catholics feel that anything short of the full traditional doctrine of transubstantiation — the bread and wine at the Mass are changed into Christ's body and blood: the Real Presence — puts us on the slippery slope to perdition. But the marks of receiving Holy Communion — in the Catechism of the Catholic Church they include "preserving, increasing, and renewing the life of grace received at Baptism"; "growth in Christian life"; "cleansing us from past sins and preserving us from future sins"; and "strengthening our charity" — would seem to me to be in effect, even if the communicant has no idea of the Real Presence. Ergo, if we fall out over a philosophical dispute concerning the "substance" of the Eucharist, what can be said about our Christian charity in the first place?
As I talked about in Reason and Love, the well-known Catholic writer George Weigel has it that "the reason of God, the Logos through whom all things were made, calls us beyond reason to love" (see this article by Mr. Weigel). That notion echoes what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and as pope. Says Mr. Weigel:
[The "scandal" of the Cross] is not a scandal against reason; it is a scandal beyond reason. Creation, Joseph Ratzinger once wrote, displays the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love.”
I think the principle of "not against reason, but beyond reason" offers a way out of the disputes that formally divide Protestants and Catholics.
Take, for example, Mr. Beckwith's saying in his blog post:
... I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power ...
What jumps out at me here is that Mr. Beckwith thinks the Reformed (Protestant) view of justification is "biblically and historically defensible," and so is the Catholic view. They're both defensible to human reason. In other words, neither is "against reason."
Accordingly, I think it ought to be possible for us Catholics and our Protestant friends to learn to debate in amity which of our two distinctive views "has more explanatory power," or whatever ... but debate it only after we have broken bread together, as we share in the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love," a love that we all agree lies "beyond reason."
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