Benedict may say that divided Christians must “keep in view just how much we have in common . . . in terms of the great deposit of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds,” as Matthew Schmitz wrote yesterday, and some modern Lutherans may agree, but this is not universally held by Luther’s Protestant descendants. One knows this, of course, but relations between serious Evangelicals and Catholics have progressed so far even in the last decade that one assumes that now only the self-described Fundamentalists, at the margins even of their own world, insist on the extreme Protestant rejection of Rome.
You don’t assume that Timothy George and his peers in Evangelicals and Catholics Together speak for everyone on their side of things, but you do assume that the traditional sharp rejection of Catholics and Catholicism has died away. Our Protestant friends obviously think their Catholic friends very seriously mistaken on several very basic matters, but they don’t think of us as dangers to the Faith. Even if many conservative Protestants aren’t as generous as Timothy et al., he and his peers represent the largest application of a liberality now general among those Christians.
But then today, reading a blog written by serious and thoughtful Calvinists who haven’t in the past shown much interest in attacking the Catholic Church, I came across an item commending as thoughtful, worth engaging, etc., in a way that suggested the author thought the writer was on to something, a paper that described Catholicism as a religion competing with true Christianity and in fact deeply anti-Christian, a false religion that loudly repudiates the true Gospel and is as bad today as it was at the Reformation, an apostate body that tells infernal lies and has murdered true believers, a deep spiritual threat to all mankind, and finally, the Devil’s kingdom and the enemy of the Lord which he prays the Lord will quickly destroy. The writer is willing to say that the pope is not necessarily the anti-Christ but insists that he’s at least one of the anti-Christs. (He also insists, bafflingly to me, that abstaining from meat expresses a damnable heresy.)
One reads this with the surprise mixed with concern one feels upon watching a man betting all his savings on the Mets or the Pirates winning the 2013 World Series in four games. I’m certainly not offended, and respect the writer’s sincerity and consistency, and am not worried that the paper will have any effect, even to confirm the prejudices of the people who read it. It’s an echo chamber kind of paper.
But I am surprised by the recommendation, which was close to a commendation, coming from someone within the mainstream of the serious confessional Calvinist world. These are people with whom, I would have said from my own experiences with them, the Catholic can speak, but apparently not so freely or easily as I would have said, since some of them want the Lord to destroy our Church, now. It’s vexing. We have not moved as far as I had thought.
Later p.s.: This was purely coincidental, since I wrote this not knowing Timothy George had written an On the Square article for today, but for a contrast with the polemic described above see his Benedict XVI, the Great Augustinian. Timothy writes, for example, of “the Holy Father—we can still call him that until February 28.”
February 19th, 2013 | 11:04 am
Would you mind naming names? This would be helpful for your readers. Without links to the relevant items I’m left with a general, hazy suspicion that all those Calvinists out there are mean-spirited.
February 19th, 2013 | 11:11 am
It is amazing that after all this time the Calvinists cannot get beyond 16th Century prejudices. Of course, the basis of Calvinism is anti-Catholicism, or it would not exist as a faith. It is a break-off, a protest, of the Catholic Faith and as, such, and as the name suggests, man-made. Protestantism by definition must criticize the Catholic Faith as deviating from some sort of “pure Christianity”. Ergo, the Pope is not from Peter, but some sort of accretion. But, to use the term anti-Christ does seem a bit much. Note the effigy of the Pope is still burned in Lewes, every year, just a few miles up the road a piece.
February 19th, 2013 | 11:16 am
Thank you for this article. I would like to read the article you mentioned that described Catholicism as a false religion. I have come into contact with people who might follow this thinking. Where can I read this article?
February 19th, 2013 | 11:21 am
My impression, based entirely on personal and necessarily limited experiences, is that a lot of contemporary Protestants are simply quieter nowadays on Catholicism. That doesn’t mean anything has changed. When the discussion gets real, the anti-Catholicism is still incredibly deep and harsh. Catholics are seen as, not only not really Christians, but anti-Christian.
It’s just the surface tone that’s more civil.
February 19th, 2013 | 11:36 am
Tom Ward: I won’t be naming names. That wouldn’t be helpful, and my point wasn’t to start an argument with the writers but to comment on this evidence of a gap between divided Christians I hadn’t expected. You shouldn’t generalize from this example anything about “all those Calvinists,” who are as diverse a group as any other.
February 19th, 2013 | 11:38 am
supertradmum: I would suggest that responding to the toxic piece referenced here with a sweeping, dismissive, stereotyping, self-righteous generalization is not going to help the tone or content of ecumenical discussion. Yes, there’s a distinctly nasty strand within the Calvinist stream of the Christian tradition–one which, unfortunately, is vastly over-represented on the Internet–but it isn’t representative of all Calvinists by any means.
Truth is, any statement about “*the* Calvinists” is ignorant just on that basis . . . if any tradition within the universal church could be described as monolithic, it isn’t our fractious bunch. It’s a reasonable bet that at least one of the authors to whom Mr. Mills refers has said something nearly as harsh against another Calvinist. I do not say this, of course, as an argument in favor of Calvinism or its adherents; there is indeed an ill to be diagnosed here. It’s just important to get the diagnosis right.
February 19th, 2013 | 11:50 am
Mills is dismayed to learn that Lutherans might actually follow Luther. Yet when I observe that some Catholics don’t subscribe to all the Church’s teachings, others roundly denouncing them as not “true” Catholics, but merely Protestants in Catholic’s clothing.
I’m reminded of politicians who all speak highly of compromise – provided compromise means other people moving closer to the politician’s preferences, not the other way around.
February 19th, 2013 | 11:51 am
I think much of the supposed tolerance is based on ignorance of teachings of their churches or on relativism – “Don’t we all teach the same things, just with different emphasis?”. e. g. I met a young male technician in Clemson, S.C. wearing a beautiful gold crucifix which I admired. Thinking that he might be Catholic I asked if that was the case. “No, I’m a Presbyterian. Do you know what that is? It’s kinda like a cross between Catholicism and Protestantism.” LOL. I kept a straight face, but I swear that 4.3 earthquake we felt that week was Jean Calvin and John Knox rolling over in their graves. All the churches need to do a lot better catechesis of their faithful.
February 19th, 2013 | 11:53 am
David Mills: Understood. But here’s why it would be helpful: it’s true that from what you say I cannot infer anything about *every* Calvinist blogger out there, but I can infer that *any* of them could have the divisive views you report. If we knew who wrote the pieces you mention, we could come to our own conclusions (perhaps) about how representative they are of the Calvinist movement. As it stands, we’re left guessing.
February 19th, 2013 | 11:55 am
Growing up I often heard people use language like “Are they Christian or are they Catholic?” and “I thought so-and-so was a Christian, but I just found out they’re Catholic.” I still hear far more people say things like that than folks who don’t engage in regular religious conversation would guess. Also, we regularly have folks leave anti-catholic Chick tracts in our parking lot. We’re an Episcopal church, and from the amount of anti-Catholicism I encounter, I can only imagine what my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters must encounter.
February 19th, 2013 | 12:02 pm
There is a real and tragic wound from this kind of division, and I don’t want to minimize that. And yet, anecdotally, Calvinists who take the Church’s claims seriously enough to disagree with them vehemently are much more likely to convert (eventually) than the average evangelical. (I was one of them.)
Supertradmum, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Calvinists to evolve beyond prejudices against the Church or commend them for doing so — I think it’s rooted in doctrine, not raw emotional prejudice against “the other.” I respect Calvinists who adhere to what they believe to be true, and what Calvinists have believed for hundreds of years. It’s good practice for being an obedient Catholic.
February 19th, 2013 | 12:07 pm
One notes that there have historically been those who abstained from meat for heretical reasons. There is a good reason why it was written into the Benedictine Rule that, although the monks refrained from flesh, this was not because there was anything wrong with doing so.
February 19th, 2013 | 12:10 pm
If Calvinists aren’t opposed to the Catholic Church, what reason can they give for continuing to live in schism, a state that is repeatedly and explicitly condemned in scripture?
February 19th, 2013 | 12:22 pm
You just have to watch TBN or the Church Channel regularly to realize that the old Protestant Anti-Catholicism is not dead. To be sure, it is far more muted than 50 years ago and not central to the preoccupations of most preachers (though John Hagee is an exception on both counts). But it’s still there (for Hal Lindsey, the Catholic Church is still the “Anti-Church” that will organize the false world-religion of Anti-Christ). I cannot see how it can be otherwise: the Catholic Church as the corrupt counterfeit church is one of the founding myths of Protestanism, functioning in much the same way that the myths of the “Dark Ages” and Galileo’s Trial form the self-understanding of secular humanists. Since such myths are central to the self-understanding of these movements (be it Protestantism or Secular Humanism), they are relatively impervious to sound historical evidence or logical argumentation. And I speak as an orthodox Catholic revert who considers himself very friendly to Evangelical Protestantism (hence the reason I watch TBN and the Church Channel regularly!).
February 19th, 2013 | 12:23 pm
I am a Protestant who has come out of an increasingly Calvinist local church. In my experience at that church, and in reading the work of some of the most highly regarded Modern Calvinists, I believe that anti-Catholicism is alive and well in the Calvinist world. But it is also true that some of the more strident Calvinists despise Arminians, who are fellow Protestants, equally with Catholcs. They seem to be quick to call heresy whenever a variation on full-on Calvinist thinking appears.
February 19th, 2013 | 12:51 pm
Sadly, Roman Catholics are no better, if not, in my experience worse (with wonderful exceptions). No small number reject Lumen Gentium, Ut Unam Sint and Dominus Iesus and insist that non-members are going to Hell, aren’t Christian, etc. Even those non-members who are in much greater agreement than many Roman Catholics, with their own denomination’s teachings.
There is even a law firm which names itself after a burner of Lutherans, as though he were a figure who promoted religious freedom.
Both sides of the Alps have a lot to work on in themselves.
February 19th, 2013 | 12:56 pm
Nobody.really: I wasn’t dismayed to find that Lutherans follow Luther, because 1) I was writing about Calvinists, not Lutherans, a point you really should have noticed, and 2) I was dismayed by the extremity of the position among people who in my relations with them (or their colleagues, to be precise) have not been so strongly anti-Catholic. I’d thought that they were closer to Timothy George (himself a Calvinist, if not a five-point one, I think) than to the fellow whose paper I summarized and was vexed to find they weren’t.
Tom Ward: *I* don’t know how representative they are — my point is that their thinking is significant because they’re serious, thoughtful, and in the mainstream of the confessional Calvinist world. You shouldn’t extrapolate from what I said about them to anyone else. I’m not really concerned that readers come to a conclusion about how representative they are because that’s not my subject.
February 19th, 2013 | 2:21 pm
What disturbs me as a Catholic is not that some Protestants think of the Catholic Church as a dangerous perversion of true Christianity. Given certain theological assumptions that are not intrinsically absurd, that conclusion may follow quite logically. Nor do I see anything shocking in a Protestant wishing that God would immediately destroy the Catholic Church, if what is meant is just that God would make all Catholics immediately become sincere Protestants. What else should a Protestant wish for? I myself wish that all Protestants would immediately become sincere Catholics. That is simply to say that I think Catholicism true.
What does disturb me is misinformation about what the Catholic Church actually teaches and has taught. There really is no excuse in an age when reliable information is so easily obtained for people to continue to say that the Catholic Church countenances the idolatrous worship of statues, teaches that we can work our way into heaven, and things of that sort.
Similarly, it is wrong for Catholics to propagate myths about Protestants. But there is a certain lack of symmetry, I have found. The average Catholic who doesn’t spend much time looking into such things does not have a standard set of false ideas about what Protestants believe. Rather, on that subject, he draws almost a complete blank. He very likely knows that Protestants don’t have priests, mass, nuns, confession, and so on, and that they can get divorced and remarried. But he couldn’t give you a list of “heretical” or “un-Christian” doctrines that Protestants uphold. Indeed, he probably could not even give you a list of distinctive Protestant beliefs at all.
So at the grassroots, one tends to find Catholic ignorance (not uncommonly, even about the tenets of their own religion!) and Protestant misinformation.
February 19th, 2013 | 2:22 pm
As a former member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), the PCA, and the LCMS (the latter the true Catholic Lite church and a wonderful bridge into the Real (Presence) Church–to be preferred in my view to swimming the Tiber. It’s not as tiring and you don’t get wet walking across a bridge), I try to keep up on matters reformed and orthodox Lutheran. Reformation 21 is a site for confessional evangelicals, including at least one, Carl Trueman who is a delightful, witty, British essayist, vigorously opposed to tawdry (of course, there is no tasteful) American consumerism and American Constantinian politics. He is also an OPC pastor, endowed chair history prof in Westminster Theological Seminary, who admires boxing, classic rock music (as did Francis Schaeffer) and, apparently, like John Murray, good drink, although he may abstain from cigars. He is openly not anti-Catholic and refuses to call himself “evangelical.” He has good precedent for such refusal. J Gresham Machen refused to be called a “fundamentalist” and the OPC is not a member of the National Association of Evangelicals.
There are some good Protestant and Reformed guys out there, as David Mills says.
February 19th, 2013 | 3:29 pm
Tom Ward — it seems to me that the way to avoid the “general, hazy suspicion” is simply to assume that David Mills is speaking about specific people, and that any given Calvinist you meet is not who he is talking about, until you have reason to believe that he is.
IOW, if it’s not meant as a generalization, and David says it’s not, then don’t generalize.
February 19th, 2013 | 4:05 pm
If I were to boil down the Calvinist – Roman Catholic dispute to its essence, it is this.
When Catholics say “justification” they mean the juridical “not guilty” decree and they also mean growth in holiness.
When Calvinists say “justification” they only mean the juridical decree.
When Catholics say “faith” they mean belief, but Protestants believe in “a faith that works” — a complete faith.
The Lutheran / Calvinist insight is that if you are looking *only* at the juridical “not guilty” decree (what Protestants call “justification,” but which is only a subset of what Catholics call justification), it is not made on the basis of anything in us or anything we do, but solely on the merits of Christ imputed to us. The means by which we receive it is faith.
This sounds remarkably like what we say at mass — “Though we are sinners, we trust in your mercy and love. Do not consider what we truly deserve, but grant us your forgiveness.”
I don’t see how the Lutheran / Calvinist insight is contrary to Catholic doctrine in any way, and it seems it would be an easy thing for a pope to make that explicit in an encyclical. IOW — *if* we use the words the way the Protestants are using them, then yes, we can agree on that narrow point, but we have to insist that justification is a larger thing, etc. etc.
The fact that the Catholic Church has never done this — after hundreds of years — feeds and, in a way, justifies Protestant anti-Catholicism.
Protestants insist that the juridical decree is received by faith alone. Can the Catholic Church affirm that or not?
If not, then Protestants will always stand apart and they will always have grounds for calling the Catholic Church antichrist.
February 20th, 2013 | 7:40 am
Once, when driving in the South and listening to “Christian” radio, I mused that if I were to open a parish there, I wouldn’t mess around, but just call it “Great Whore of Babylon.” Yes, anti-Catholic prejudice is alive, not only among the post-religious descendants of the Puritans (progressives) but among those who have retained their Christian identity.
February 21st, 2013 | 2:25 am
Sadly, anti-Catholicism has not breathed its last breath. Anyone who has studied the teachings of Catholicism cannot honestly deny that it’s not just Christian, but probably the first of Christians. And although I respect Calvinism, and those who adhere to it, I’ve always been scratching my head about something: since one of the tenets of Calvinism is that God already has decided who will be saved and who will be damned, and the latter profoundly outnumber the former, what’s the motivation for Calvinist writers, such as the one mentioned in this article, to try and convince anyone of anything, or change anyone’s mind? After all, mere humans efforts will obviously not affect who’s saved and who’s damned? Logically, it seems to me, the Clavinist has painted himself into a box: for him to be logically consistent, he shouldn’t try, through writings, etc., to change anyone’s mind, because God’s will is set.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, one of the most beautiful, and inspiring passages (there are, of course, many), is the statement that God predestines no one to Hell.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact