Protestantism
Essay from scientist and priest Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J

Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

We all accept the basic dogma of an only God who exists in three Persons, and the theological consequence of the Redeeming Incarnation of the Son. In some way, we all profess a belief in the transforming Resurrection of Christ and in the promise of our own resurrection, partaking of Christ's new way of existing.

We also hold that the saving mission of our Redeemer is active in a deep and mysterious way in the Body of the faithful who carry on the work of the Apostles to offer the Truth received from Christ to the whole of humanity, at all times and places. A unique Baptism gives us a new birth "from water and the Spirit" to become new creatures with an intimate flow of life that we receive from Christ, the only true Vine, of which we are the branches.

This impressive list of shared beliefs is the basis for our hope that we will overcome old divisions, frequently due to reasons of a merely human and cultural nature, or even to political pressures. We should avoid dwelling upon historical wrongs or confrontations due to personal differences or to misunderstandings of concrete theological tenets: let the dead bury their dead, in the words of Christ himself. But, after that is said, we can´t easily take the desired step of accepting as equally valid all the different forms of expressing our Faith and of applying it to the life of the Church.

With a desire for clarity -seeking Truth- and without any attitude of rivalry, I would still consider that a necessary step will be to specify points where Protestantism -either in its original formulation or in its basic contemporary forms- is at odds with Catholic Theology in a way that has important consequences.

I realize that there are many different groups under the general name of "Protestants", and I will try to limit this discussion to the basic ideology, common to the best known denominations of today.

I consider that the most revolutionary position of Protestantism, at its origin and in our time, consisted in accepting as the ONLY basis for Christian Faith the written biblical texts. And the surprising assertion that all interpretations of that text, even those that are contradictory, are equally valid.

This "relativism" implicitly denies that our Faith is a fixed ensemble of truths dealing with our relationship to God in Christ. But Christ defined Himself as "The Truth, the Way and the Life" and the Apostles -John, Peter and Paul- dismissed as proper of the Anti-Christ any distortion of their message, an attitude that is clearly incompatible with accepting as equally valid any private interpretation of our dogmas.

Even when we deal with human thinking, one cannot -in any science- deny the principle of non-contradiction that is a necessary condition for our rationality. Obviously God cannot contradict Himself, and it would be unreasonable to ask from anybody to suffer martyrdom for the sake of a doubtful "truth".

The first step -taking a written text as the only basis for our Faith- is rather surprising when we know that the Apostles transmitted the Gospel message through the spoken word, by their preaching, when most people did not know how to read. Christ sent his disciples to preach, and neither He nor the majority of his disciples left written texts.

We can add to this that very soon it became necessary to distinguish the writings considered trustworthy from others that "embellished" the Christian message or that distorted it in the "apocryphal books . A written text can never be its own warranty of truth: we justly doubt many newspaper accounts or even books presented as "scientific". It was necessary to rely upon the teaching of a hierarchical Church, under the guidance of the Spirit -promised as the teacher of the full Truth- to establish the "canon" of sources that were a sure basis for our Faith.

Otherwise, the most we could say would be that, among a variety of texts, some are God's Word, but we don't know which ones: a totally insufficient basis to lead me to make that Faith the norm of my life even to the point of accepting martyrdom for it. The same teaching authority is required to distinguish the unchanging Faith from any subjective interpretations of the texts.

Changing the criterion for certainty as done in Protestantism leads to a denial of the Faith as a "rational offering to God", leaving it at the level of a "feeling" without any clear logical content. If the Faith is to be applied to our life, as a consequence of a Truth that is rationally known, it must require an act of the free human will, the only activity that can be meritorious precisely because it is free, even if God's grace helps us always. But we cannot be responsible for our feelings or emotions: even great saints underwent periods of "a dark night of the soul" -when they could not feel the enthusiasm that our beliefs can produce- but that did not imply that their Faith was less strong at that time.

The traditional statement stresses that our Faith should be a rational response of the human person who knows, by Revelation, God's love and his saving plan through Christ in his Church, and freely accepts its consequences as a norm for a relationship to God and to other men.

Stressing the rational aspect we reject the frequent error of saying that our Faith cannot have proofs, because it would cease to be a free act. The freedom we affirm denies an act due to external pressure, like a political or social imposition, but it does not imply a lack of cogent reasons -true proofs- to accept its contents: to accept something without proofs would be irrational in any field of knowledge.

In the area of history we accept as a proof the testimony of trustworthy witnesses, and this is also the case in a court of Law, where we seek a "certainty beyond reasonable doubt". This is the way human culture develops, resting upon the shoulders of the "giants who preceded us" using the humble acknowledgment attributed to Newton.

In the Gospel we find that Thomas' confession after touching the wounds of the risen Christ is accepted as faith, even if he is told that he should have accepted the testimony of the other Apostles. And Thomas goes farther than the rest -who believed simply in the Resurrection- when he salutes Christ as "My Lord and my God": the physical proof of the living reality of His Body leads him to infer his divinity. There is no opposition between the almost crude test of the Resurrection and its meaning for a transcendent Faith.

Throughout the centuries the Christian Faith is proclaimed as rational because of the promise to the Church of being free from any error through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. If God requires that we accept Christ and his message of salvation, He cannot leave the faithful transmission of its contents at the mercy of human frailty with its many dangers of misinterpretations or incomplete teachings.

Any group that presents its own theological Creed as doubtful is clearly implying that such an ensemble of "Truths" does not come from God, where one can never find any error or contradiction. But only in the Catholic Church are the dogmatic teachings considered true and unchanging, not because we claim to be more intelligent, but only because we have received them with a divine warranty given to the shepherds who continue Peter's role of leading the faithful.

We must remember that the theologians -with their academic efforts- are not the source of our Faith, but only those who continue the teaching role of the Apostles and their successors.

The concept of "Church" is also drastically altered at least in the visible aspects of Protestantism. From the first moment, the Church that Christ instituted appears as endowed with three powers that the Apostles exercised and transmitted to their disciples: the power to infallibly teach the one Faith received from Christ, the power to govern and establish Christian communities with divine authority (including liturgical norms for prayer and ethical behavior), and the power to sanctify through sacraments that were entrusted to the Apostles as representatives of Christ, especially with the forgiveness of sins and the Eucharistic celebration (where the celebrant "impersonates" Christ at the Last Supper).

These powers are either denied or glossed over in the typical Protestant community, where one finds no certainty in the teaching of the Faith and no true priesthood. The "Pastor" organizes common activities and can preach more or less eloquently, but he has no especial powers either to forgive sins in Christ's name or to make Him physically present in the Eucharist by saying the words of consecration in the first person, as Christ himself. Since there is no sacramental priesthood, it seems quite normal to choose even a temple of another denomination for the Sunday celebration, simply seeking the most instructive or the most pleasant environment.

After the weekly gathering, going back to the temple does isn't worth doing: it is just a place to be together and pray, sing or listen. The Pastor is not expected to imitate Christ in a celibate life, and this finally has led to accept that a woman will be the adequate "impersonation" and representative of God's Son made Man.

This is a point worth explaining. The sacraments use the proper material and visible elements to confer grace, and only God himself can impart grace by the means that He determines. The material elements were chosen by Christ in order to express the proper grace of each sacrament in a humanly logical way: the water of Baptism -stressing the idea of the basic component of all life on Earth, as well as the cleansing from impurity and sin- cannot be replaced by milk, even if a chemist tells us that milk is mostly water.

We cannot celebrate the Eucharist with rice and whisky, even if they are more common in a given country than wheat and wine. In a similar way, it isn't logical that a woman will make Christ present taking on his personality, just as it would be improper that a man were to represent Mary if another sacrament referred to her as a historical individual.

This is the reason why the Church has clearly stated that it has no power to ordain a woman as a priest, without implying any kind of unjust discrimination due to cultural conditionings: nobody has a right to be a priest, no matter how saint or learned the person might be.

Mary, the holiest person and the one nearest to Christ, never takes the place of her Son and never exercises a priestly role as his representative: she leads to Him and, as Mother, helps his growth in his Mystical Body. She has no power to forgive sins or to say the words of consecration in the Eucharist, but she "prays for us sinners" and offers her Son to us with the intimate love of her motherly heart.

We can say- in a poetic but true statement- that the Son, "always in the Father's bosom" as John says in his Prologue to the Gospel, also as Son felt happy in Mary's bosom, and from her we receive him in our bosom in each communion.

The common way of interpreting the Eucharist in the Reformed churches simply accepts it as a symbolic commemoration, so that there is no reason to preserve it in a tabernacle for further adoration or to treat the eucharistic bread, at the end of the liturgical celebration, in any way different from the disposal of any other food. There is no reason to go back to the temple when the liturgy is finished.

Christ's promise to remain with us "until the end of time" is understood as referring only to his spiritual presence when several believers are together in his Name; the intimate embrace with his human reality -when the Word became Flesh- is lost. And the power to forgive sins -"to loosen and to bind"- on earth with a sure effect in Heaven, is no longer something real.

The two commands and powers received from Christ by his Apostles -to forgive and to feed the faithful with Christ's Body and Blood- are reduced to symbols without real content and without a concrete value in Christian life.

It is rather peculiar that some Protestant groups hold to a literal meaning for the words of Genesis regarding creation -against obvious scientific data- while denying the clear meaning of Christ's words announcing the Eucharist in the 6th chapter of John's Gospel. Christ shocked his listeners by stressing the need to chew his Flesh and drink his Blood, something that sounded like a cannibalistic orgy.

"Many of his disciples" found his words repelling and absurd -especially for a Jew- and left Him. Christ did not change a word -giving a symbolic meaning to those utterances- and asked his Apostles if they were going to leave Him as well, showing that He would rather see them go than give a different meaning to his statements. This would have been truly unjust if a symbol had just been interpreted in an improper way.

It is also clear, from St. Paul's letters and the writings of the early Church Fathers, that the primitive Church considered the Eucharist as the most valuable treasure, endowed with the highest dignity within the practices of Christian life, since it asserted Christ's physical presence. The help of the Holy Spirit to keep the Church free from error would be very deficient through 15 centuries if such a belief -that would imply idolatry if we were to adore simple bread- were wrong until Luther corrected it.

In the field of Ethics, the lack of a teaching authority in Protestantism has led to some absurd consequences. In some cases, even those who openly live by their homosexual tendencies or in divorce and re-marriage, are accepted as "representations of Christ". It is true that all of us are weak and fall into sin -that is why Christ instituted the sacrament of forgiveness- but the holiness required from his followers -and especially from those who represent Him- is incompatible with an acceptance of a sinful state clearly implied in those cases.

The Church cannot accept a worldly criterion as norm, no matter what a given society might tolerate, but it must be the clean and powerful "leaven" that should change that culture to put it in accordance with the injunction Christ gave to his followers: "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect".

The multiplicity of Protestant "Churches" has also led to a dependence from civil powers or to their being limited to a concrete environment in a given place or time. An "Anglican" Church, depending upon a royal power, cannot pretend to be the means of salvation for the entire human race redeemed by Christ; the same must be said of any church that is limited to a particular country or social level.

We should remember Paul's words: "For you, there are no longer Jews or Greeks or gentiles" but only members of the one Body of the Mystical Christ. This was the way the early Christians lived their One Faith, with One Baptism, under the One Lord and Father, according to Christ's last will: "that all may be One, as you, Father, and I are One".

There can be no divisions of doctrine, or of sacramental life or apostolic power, without acknowledging that such a state is contradictory to the message of salvation.

There is a constant temptation to adjust the Church to different "cultures" even to the extent of changing dogmas and sacraments to "be with the times" or to incorporate to it other traditional beliefs and practices. This is incompatible with the unity and Truth that Christ embodies and that constitutes the way by which we can go to the Father. When we speak correctly of the need for a "new evangelization" in our time, the novelty cannot be a change in the message. but rather a way of presenting it that insists upon those aspects of it that seem most adverse to our contemporaries.

It is precisely the "relativism" that today prevails that rejects -even to the point of considering it absurd- the claim that there is a Truth to be sought and accepted, and that such Truth is unchanging and of universal value. If that claim is tolerated for scientific facts, it is almost instinctively rejected for any other type of knowledge, and most especially for anything dealing with Religion and its ethical consequences.

"Usefulness" and common acceptance by public opinion become the norm for truth and for laws and moral judgments. The Christian message is reduced to "one way" among many others, all equally valid according to personal or social circumstances. With this attitude, there can be no reason to consider as especially important and transcendent the historical fact of the Incarnation and Redemption, the essential message of the Church.

A superficial ecumenism that forgets those basic truths is not desirable. Citing the ancient philosophical saying, "I am a friend of Plato, but a closer friend of Truth", we must say that we are friends of our separated brethren, but we cannot accept their errors.

Rather, that love leads us to take every possible step to help them attain the perfect Faith and the fullness of grace of the sacraments. This is more than just praying together: it should reach the partaking of the sacramental presence of Christ just as He entrusted it to his Church to be shared by all peoples at all times.

The scandal of our many divisions is the greatest obstacle for the universal message of Christ to reach to the ends of the world, a supernatural message of redemption and life that cannot change in the process of enlightening other peoples. Our sincere prayers "for the union of the Churches" must be addressed to the all-powerful Spirit, able to overcome all our limitations and the memories of old wrongs and hurts.