Reformation Catholicism
The Essay
I am becoming something that does not exist. Like the pegasus, satyr, or great American jackalope, what makes this creature fantastical is not something about itself, but rather its combining of apparently divergent natures. I am suggesting nothing less than the reunification of the Church, at least as far as Protestants and Catholics are concerned. Many long conversations have taught me not to take for granted a baseline understanding of one side by the other. I begin, then, with a dispatch on the present state of American Protestantism.
State of the Disunion: Protestant America
If you are a Christian and don’t know if you’re Protestant, then that’s definitely what you are. To be Protestant is to trace your spiritual lineage back to the Reformation, especially to John Calvin, Martin Luther, Henry VIII, or the Anabaptists. It is ultimately a question of religious genetics, which explains the family resemblance between the various children—though given that Pentecostalism is the grandchild of Anglicanism, the likeness is clearly stretched thin at points. Although there are historically a handful of major traditions (and a dizzying number of denominations), a massive consolidation is currently underway in the Protestant world, pushing us closer and closer to “unity by lowest-common-denominator.” We once primarily identified as Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, etc., but such tags are now little more than matters of taste: you like contemporary worship music and I like hymns. Infant baptism, use of images, communion—if we think about them at all, we consider them a matter for individual discernment. Your denomination is a much weaker predictor of your beliefs than whether you are theologically Evangelical or Liberal.
If you don’t know which of these you are, you’re Evangelical. Despite our best efforts to sully the word with aggressive, nationalistic movements, the term is ancient and should be restored to respectable status. To be Evangelical does not mean you watch Fox News. It means you think the Bible is God’s authoritative Word, that God became one of us in the man Jesus Christ, whose execution and resurrection made a way for us to re-enter relationship with God, and that this truth forms the cornerstone of a new reality encompassing human and non-human creation. If this just sounds like Christianity itself, you’ll be surprised to learn that not everyone agrees.
Key to the Evangelical story about Christianity is the idea that something is wrong with us. We are not presently what we were intended to be. Here Liberals and Evangelicals part company. For Evangelicals (and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and basically all Christians everywhere before 1960), the problem is that we are by nature prone to selfishness, cowardice, greed, and every other sort of nasty behavior. It is by a miracle that we start to be set right, and it takes nothing less than the literal indwelling of God in our hearts to pull it off. Liberals1 do not agree. For them, the primary issue is not something within us but without us. Our environment is such that it imposes limits on resources, subjects us to tragedy, or malforms us through unjust social structures. All these conspire to twist the fundamentally good nature of every individual towards what historic Christianity calls “sin.” The individual, thus, is typically excusable. It is not their fault that they were born into these systems. If “angels”2 ran our government for a few generations, wrongdoing would virtually disappear.
Indiana Jones, staring at a gold statue, wonders if he can safely swap it with a sack of dirt. He cannot. Liberals wonder if they can swap the Fall of humans for the Fall of society. They cannot—at least not if they want to escape the Temple of Doom.3 Without a Fall that ruins human nature, the notion of sanctification is translated into the need to repair social structures. An act of inward self-examination, of laboriously bringing our lives into conformity with the call of Christ, becomes the comparatively simple matter of enacting external change in the world. The boulder starts rolling. If sanctification is external, so is salvation. I am not saved from the fires of Hell—we are saved by our collective action from the hell we’ve created on Earth. God, therefore, is not the Savior of my soul, but the Superintendent of social reform. But say, what work exactly is God doing in this system anyway? In fact, it is not God but our belief in God that seems key to carrying out this project. We might invent an impressive number of reasons to hold on to religiosity at this point, but none of them will say the one thing Christians have always insisted on: the reason we should talk about God is that He’s real.
Within every Protestant tradition, there are Liberal and Evangelical denominations. The Liberal one will usually be the oldest, and largest, and have all the pretty churches. There are historical reasons for this, but they do not concern us here. What’s important is to be aware of our trajectory. A hundred years ago, Protestants had serious ecclesial (that is, church-based) authority. There was one (!!) Presbyterian church in America, thus as a Presbyterian you were effectively bound by whatever governance, doctrinal, or disciplinary decision it might issue. Now there are more than five Presbyterian denominations, none of which exercises this kind of authority. Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Anglicans share similar stories. The upshot? No one in the Protestant world has or even claims substantial authority in theological disputes. This might not seem like a big deal since the Bible can guide us, but asking the Bible to resolve these debates may be asking a vine to press its own grapes.
The splintering of traditions put an end to the first 450 years or so of Protestantism, when we rigorously adhered to creeds, confessions, and canons, and trusted our churches to faithfully interpret them. Liberals have filled this gap with secular leftist ideologies based on power, economics, race, and sex. Evangelicals have adverted to the fundamental source of Christian revelation: the Bible. From the beginning, the Reformers were calling for Christians to return to the Bible, to become devoted to its memorization and internalization. Evangelicals have taken up this strain as (in part) a way to cope with the loss of robust doctrinal guidance. Surely, the thought goes, this is God’s Word, and as such it should be complete. An attentive, studious, Spirit-filled reading should reliably lead us to the truth. If only this were so.
Why do academically trained, well-meaning, zealous Christians often come to very different conclusions after consulting Scripture? I once started an essay on this question called “When the Pious Feud,” but stopped when I realized my Protestant resources couldn’t give a good answer. If we don’t have any external authority to settle a question, we have to think that God has put the answer in His revelation. When we disagree with someone about its meaning, then, we have three options. First, we might think the other person is stupid: they’ve not read the right book, or taken the right class, or listened to the right podcast. They’re just dense. Alternatively, they might be wicked: the Spirit will “lead us into all truth,” so if they’re not seeing it, it must be a heart issue. They’re resisting God’s instruction from sinful motives. Neither of these options is attractive, and both threaten to divide the precarious alliance between various forms of Evangelical Christianity. Better, then, to take the third option: stop talking about anything beyond the essentials, which thankfully the Spirit does seem to consistently reveal to all faithful readers.
The Evangelical solution to a lack of church authority and a lack of universal clarity from Scripture is to stick to preaching the most basic form of Christianity, unencumbered by reference to council or dogma. This bare-bones Gospel is easy to explain and appropriate. It can be pitched at YoungLife, the National Prayer Breakfast, or in the last few minutes of a comedy set. It can be memorized in the form of the Romans Road or the Four Spiritual Laws. And so far as it goes, it’s a very, very good thing. But it is not all the very, very good things that Christianity is. Christianity is first and foremost a relationship of love with the God-man Jesus Christ, who saves us and leads us home. But it is also a religion two thousand years old. Reducing it to a few basic truths denies Christians the rich spiritual and intellectual inheritance that is theirs by right.
And, anyways, we have to make decisions about secondary issues. It may not be a matter of eternal life or death, but daily life forces us to choose: will we serve communion to other denominations, or won’t we? Will we rebaptize someone, or not? Will we depict Christ visually, or have songs with instruments, or sing anything other than Psalms? Everything that in the past we could look to established documents for guidance on still needs to be dealt with. “Secondary” does not mean “trivial.” In fact, secondary questions may be a matter of physical life and death, since one disputed element of Christian ethics is whether we should be pacifistic. Whether or not you fight to defend us may cost me my life. These issues have not ceased to matter just because we don’t know what to say or how to say it.
One more reason to think that being able to settle secondary issues is vital. We ought to be able to fit the whole world in our Christianity. If it really is the truth, then it should have something to say about everything. A Christianity that settles for less is just that: settling. We might say that if we cannot settle feuds, we will have to settle for feuds.
Despite a doctrinal handicap, Evangelical Protestant groups are strong. In America, actually, they are the only segment of Christianity not hemorrhaging numbers. The Liberal mainline is shrinking dramatically and doing nothing about it—they are not likely to last beyond another generation or two. Evangelicals are growing, united around a constellation of public pastors and theologians. A large chunk has sold out to the Republican Party, but that tragedy has been addressed elsewhere by more capable writers. A remnant persists. Individual Evangelicals may gravitate towards more traditional services in denominations like the Anglican Church in North America, or more contemporary services like those in the Foursquare Church. But these dramatically different kinds of services are henceforth matters of personal preference, different colors depicting the same basic image.
What the Catholics Have
Living in tight community with serious Catholics for the past two years has frequently left me shocked at my ignorance of them, and their ignorance of me. I, like most all Protestants, received plenty of direct and indirect propaganda about Catholicism growing up. This included the likely suspects: that Catholics worship Mary, that they believe in salvation by works, that they compromise the Faith by allocating too much power to a merely human institution, that the Vatican has proven thoroughly corrupt, that the Crusades were conclusive proof against the pope’s status as the shepherd of the Church on Earth, that indulgences amounted to paying for permission to sin, and that purgatory is a bizarre extrabiblical concept that exists to punish anyone whose balance sheet doesn’t include enough good works (or purchased substitutes). As I got to know Catholic theologians and philosophers, however, a curious thing kept happening in our conversations. Each time I thought I’d finally identified the point of contact in our conflict, I would find my swing had cleaved only air. I was swiping at shadows. Mary turned out not to be an assistant Savior, but assistant to the one and only Savior. Despite whatever might be going wrong in popular Catholic imagination, Catholic doctrine affirms salvation by faith alone through grace alone (if you don’t believe me, read the Joint Declaration of Faith and Justification between the Catholic and Lutheran churches). And so with the other issues. Eventually, I started to wonder: just what puts the “protest” in my Protestantism?
This is not the place to chronicle the excruciating experience of watching one after another redoubt fail. The place for that is the appendix (for the interested) or over a pint (for the seriously interested). The end of this desperate searching for some reason, any reason, to continue my Protest in good conscience was the sickening realization that joining the Roman communion, swimming the Tiber, entering the Church, donning the rosary, acquiring the biblical expansion pack—would not require me to surrender any of my core beliefs. In fact, I still think of myself as just as Reformed and Evangelical (though admittedly not quite as Presbyterian) as I ever was. I still think God’s sovereignty is one of the most beautiful doctrines of the Faith, that salvation is a wholly unmerited gift of God to which I contribute nothing, and that we can come to the Father through Christ alone.4 I have perhaps even become more Reformed in that I think of myself as even more depraved now than I did before, having a more consistently worked out moral system to check myself against.
But surely compatibility is too weak a reason to change communions. I might just as well fit in with the Anglican Church in North America, or my beloved Evangelical Presbyterian Church. What the Catholics have is something no other historic expression of the Faith even claims to have: the authority to set boundaries. In the spring of 2022, I did an independent study with Bruce McCormack on the doctrine of God. McCormack has had a long, illustrious career in theology. He has trained several generations of theologians. He has worked out a highly sophisticated account of God’s nature that takes the human experience of Jesus very seriously (its only flaw, alas, is being wrong). Yet when I asked him, “How can an average, dedicated Christian navigate all this stuff and avoid heresy?” he could do little better than shrug. “Is everyone really on their own, or at the mercy of the radio, the paper mill, the local pastor? Is that the best we can do?” “Eric,” he said, “you will not find what you’re looking for in Rome.” (He also threatened to find me and burn down my house if I ever joined the Roman Catholic Church. I live at Princeton Theological Seminary, however, so I welcome this.) Effectively, his answer was to concede: scattered chaos really is the best we can do. The fragmentation of Christendom can never be undone till the end of time. This means either holding that Protestantism’s best option is arguing that the Holy Spirit will guide each individual or each particular community “into all Truth” (biting the bullet on the stupid/wicked dilemma), or denying that the Holy Spirit operates this way and sinking into despair about theological truth. In this case, God will not help us work these things out at the level of the global Church, nor at the local level. We have been left as orphans.
What Catholicism offers is another way. It’s not that private judgment is sufficient, nor that communities with good intentions are guaranteed to get theology right. It is instead something rather scandalous. Catholics claim that God has chosen (perhaps even founded) a specific human institution and promised that it will not err in matters of faith and morals. This is offensive to Protestants: ought not God’s grace be free, overflowing the bounds of human constructs, unencumbered by ecclesiastic hierarchy? It has always seemed strange to me that nearly all the arguments against Rome’s claims of authority could just as easily have been lodged by the Northern Kingdom against Jerusalem, or the gentiles as a whole against the Jews. God does not seem to be as concerned as we are about erasing the scandal of particularity.
Be that as it may, Protestants are right. God’s love should overflow these bounds. And in fact it seems to do so. As the Old Testament constantly features gentiles stirred by God despite a total lack of connection to the priestly system, so it is with New Israel, the Church. The sacrificial system bound God’s people, but it did not bind God. God remained and remains free to have mercy on whom He will. The sacraments bind Him no more than sacrifices did. Catholics can freely and enthusiastically give thanks for God’s work in anyone’s life—atheist, Protestant, or (what is perhaps the biggest miracle) even Catholic. They may affirm God’s profound grace working through any means He sees fit. And yet they may insist that the sacraments remain the ordinary lawful nodes at which we tangibly receive the life of grace. More should be said about the sacraments, but I am happy to defer it to “the appendix” for the time being.
If the scandal is not too great, if God is free to do something as stunning as appoint a bunch of bumbling, sinful humans to concretely represent His rule on earth, we might be in a position to appreciate the payoff. One important implication is the existence of an objective, definitive way to settle a theological dispute: the Church can issue a ruling. If we want to avoid a theological elitism that leaves the really deep truths to the most educated of the most pious, we need a way to provide earnest Christians with guidance in doctrine and ethics. You should not need a degree to figure out what to believe and what to do. This is what the Vatican does. Granted, it does not settle every conceivable question. Each answer turns up more points for debate and clarification. But it was never meant to be a lab for cutting-edge innovation. It sets boundaries within which Christians may run free. It fences off the cliffs to enlarge the space we may play in safely. When a Catholic disagrees with others Christians, they need not think them stupid or wicked. They can instead insist that God was intelligent enough to foresee these challenges, and provided for them ahead of time.
The obvious objection is that I’ve returned the stupid/wicked dilemma on my own head. How are we supposed to discern whether the Roman Catholic Church really stands in this special relation to God? Doesn’t that question throw us into all the very same problems that came with claiming the Bible would settle our disputes? I think not. We were never intended to split. For hundreds and hundreds of years this was a practical non-issue. “Which church should I join?” was a nonsensical question. It would have been like asking, “Which country is the best for being Swedish?” In our fractured state, we’ve put ourselves beyond what God intended and outside of the doctrinal hedge of protection originally instituted for our good. I am not confident that the Spirit will guide us each to Rome. As far as I can tell, neither are most Catholic theologians. The Catholic Church seems to think of itself as Aristotle’s unmoved mover: like a magnet, it seeks unity not by going out but by drawing to itself. Hence the adage that you either marry or study your way in. This brings me to my immodest thesis: the Catholic Church desperately needs Evangelicals.
Reformation Catholicism
Sometimes Catholics pine for a day when the Church (here meaning all Christians) will once again enjoy visible, temporal unity. On these occasions, they often express what I take to be a plainly ridiculous vision. They imagine that the best way for this to happen would be for all Protestants to become Latin Rite Roman Catholics. This will not happen. But even if it could, it would not be desirable. Showing why requires a brief background. There are several rites in the Catholic Church. Each rite comes with its own style of the Mass, its own structure of priests and bishops, and its own regulations. For example, Byzantine Rite Catholics have services that look almost identical to the Eastern Orthodox, and, like the Orthodox, married men are allowed to become priests. But the spirituality of a rite goes deeper than the merely formal. Each one represents a different way of being Catholic, and together they cover an impressive diversity of expressions. Life in communion with Rome may look very different than the Latin Rite that dominates in Europe and America. My position is that the way forward for Christian unity is for the Catholic Church to open a new rite, or rather collection of rites, called the Reformation Rites.
All practicing Christians have liturgy. For Lutherans, it still obviously resembles the Mass, but even nondenominational churches have a kind of liturgy. Liturgy is the way the Faith is routinely and communally carried out, particularly in our services. Nondenom liturgy typically consists of three worship songs, announcements, a sermon, and one more worship song to bring the message home. Presbyterians might include a call-and-response reading of Scripture or a reading of the passage to be preached on concluding with “This is the Word of the Lord,” to which the congregation will respond, “Thanks be to God.” Many traditions include a time to greet other congregants, often concluded with a singing of the Doxology. Outside of services, morning devotional time in the Word or prayer, regular worship sessions, or even listening to Christian music on the radio during your daily commute all add to the fabric of our liturgical lives. And all Protestants participate to some extent in the liturgical calendar, which marks out times for different spiritual focuses throughout the year. In generations past, Christmas, Holy Week (including Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, Good Friday, and Easter), and the Sabbath were generally the only days observed by all Protestants, but more recently Evangelicals have been discovering the beauty of self-denial and mourning during Lent. The point is this: whether we recognize it as such or not, all practicing Christians live according to some spiritual rhythm, some liturgical script. Appreciating this fact is crucial to seeing how Protestants could be welcomed back into communion with Rome.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI created the Anglican Ordinariate. Of all Protestant traditions, Anglicans are closest in liturgy to the Roman Catholic Church. They structure their services from the Book of Common Prayer, originally created by Thomas Cranmer in 1549, who drew on older Christian resources. With the creation of the Ordinariate, Benedict made it possible for Anglican priests to become Catholic priests. But not in a way that erased their Anglicanism. Rather, they were allowed to retain the Anglican way of being Christian in that they were allowed to celebrate5 the Mass using a liturgy based on the Book of Common Prayer, and other distinctly Anglican characteristics were encouraged rather than suppressed. The Catholic Church has since issued a version of the Book of Common Prayer that retains the beauty of the 1662 version while making minor changes to accommodate it to Catholic requirements for the Mass. Effectively, you are now able to become Catholic and remain Anglican. This is a marvelous, unprecedented step. Anglicans may now return to Rome as homecomers and heirs rather than spiritual refugees. The implications loom so large that they’re almost too big to see.
The Ordinariate is not yet its own rite. Technically it is a “use” of the Latin Rite. But that need not remain so. It could be the first stage in a much larger process of welcoming other Protestant groups back without requiring them to renounce their heritage. Lutherans are already similar enough in service structure that relatively few adjustments would be required. Presbyterians present a bit more of a challenge, and working out what to do for Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, and nondenoms will be a major undertaking. But if the Church was able to work out the doctrine of the Trinity in just a few centuries, surely it can rise to meet this comparatively modest challenge. The key is to make a legitimate path to unity, and it will require both sides to sacrifice. Rome will have to abandon its lofty distance from other communions, and Protestants may have to accept doctrines they presently find difficult.
At this point, a few questions might arise. First, why bother? Why go to the enormous trouble of creating the Reformation Rites? The answer may become more intuitive to Catholics if they are willing to reframe how they think of the Reformation. I think of it like this: the Roman Church of 1500 had sunk to detestable levels of corruption. Although God miraculously preserved sound official teaching through this long period, the best analogy is probably King Rehoboam in 1 Kings 12-14. Rehoboam was the rightful ruler of Israel, but he was terribly cruel. He forced his own people into slavery and boasted about it. His pride and stubbornness led to the secession of the ten northern tribes, which formed the Northern Kingdom (also confusingly called Israel) over against the South Kingdom, a mere two tribes (Benjamin and Judah) and some Levites. Yet for all this, Rehoboam was still the legitimate heir of the kingship promised to Judah. And the Southern Kingdom’s capital, Jerusalem, was the only place where God could legitimately be formally worshipped. The Northern Kingdom held on for hundreds of years, but ultimately they didn’t have true kingship or temple worship. The bitter complaint of the Northern Kingdom against Rehoboam was valid, yet dividing was their ultimate doom. If God has given promises to Peter and his successors that parallel those He gave to Judah, it is our duty to cling to those promises, even when the appointed rulers seem allied with God’s enemies (as Rehoboam must certainly have seemed). Somehow, God’s promises will win through.
Very well, the Reformers gave up those special promises of preservation. But they did so because they felt enslaved to a Church that was dramatically failing her duty to be salt and light. Catholics should not be surprised to learn that there was an outpouring of extreme creativity in the first centuries of the Reformation while trying to work out how to build Christian structures resistant to the deterioration they saw in Rome. It was essentially a continent-wide experiment whose premise was, “What if we tried to figure Christianity out all over again from the Bible?” Calvin and Luther were both well-acquainted with the Patristics, especially Augustine. They knew tradition, but above all they wanted to find out what God’s Word to us would reveal about the Christian life. What emerged was a zealous, persevering devotion to the heart of the Christian faith. The treasures that welled up from this new stream of living water gave Protestantism a life of its own, which has continued to flourish for centuries. The special insights and emphases of Protestant traditions are vital to the Catholic Church because they represent a dogged devotion to the deepest truths of Christianity. I am not in a position to exposit the specific contents of these treasures as developed by every tradition, but I can speak on behalf of my own.
Evangelicals, whatever their denomination, exhibit virtues that Catholicism is in sore need of. First and foremost, Evangelicals love the Bible. This point is hard to overstate. We see the words of Scripture as the lifeblood of Christian life, the primary place we regularly encounter God’s voice, and the wellspring of Christian doctrine. We wear the words of Scripture on jewelry, tattoo it on our bodies, commit it to memory, and make it the focus of nearly all spiritual gatherings. Because we learn from John 1 that the Son is also the Word, we understand that the Bible in some special way represents the Second Person of the Trinity, so carries with it a divine power to transform lives and reshape the world. We write it on the walls of our homes, announce it in the public square, and risk life and limb to bring it to countries where it is scarce. I know of an Evangelical professor from Whitworth University who spent his life creating a written language for the Kamwe (pronounced com-way) people of Africa so that he could translate the Bible into it. He is currently typing eight hours every day in a race against blindness to complete the Old Testament. Along the way he also created their first dictionary, helping preserve their language and cultural identity for future generations.6 Evangelicals will go to unbelievable lengths to bring God’s Word to God’s world. And it’s not just a matter of simplistic devotion. Protestant academics have led the charge on Biblical interpretation. Nearly all major commentaries in the last several hundred years were written by Protestant scholars, and it is no accident that the best Catholic commentator alive today, Scott Han, was Protestant before he was Catholic.
Another distinctive of Evangelicals is an unswerving focus on the Gospel. I once heard someone quip that if you mention “the Gospel” to Catholics, they think you’ve left off an “s”. The Gospel is simply the good news that Jesus Christ, in His Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, has done everything necessary to bring us back into relationship with God. Evangelicals are correct that this is the defining message of Christianity, and that it is to be proclaimed in the life and speech of every believer. Because we are conscious of the fact that our salvation is fundamentally God’s free gift, our pursuit of holiness7 is a response of gratitude—and indeed is itself an organic outworking of God’s immeasurable grace. Not because we think we might somehow add to or become worthy of this gift. Thus, we strive for a morally upright life without falling as frequently into scrupulosity or fear. “Those who the Son sets free are free indeed.”
Evangelicals also exhibit a tireless entrepreneurial spirit. We are not daunted by the task of creating new institutions, or reimagining outreach, or figuring out how to connect with the local culture. If we arrive at a school or area that doesn’t offer small groups for discipleship and Bible study, we are likely to simply start our own. We do not see pastors as the “real” Christians, or even spiritual in a way beyond what is demanded of everyone. We learn instruments so we can play them for churches or other spiritual gatherings, found organizations to fight for the poor and exploited, and constantly evaluate our own practices for effectiveness. We long to see every heart come to know Jesus Christ as Lord. A fire burns in us for the world’s renewal; we will gladly raze mountains and raise valleys to see it done.
I could go on at length. But at this point Catholics are likely to object that none of these actually conflict with Catholic teaching, and Protestants are likely to object that the fact that Catholics have to learn this from us invalidates their claim to being God’s appointed church. To the Catholics I offer my full assent. These qualities are compatible with Catholicism, and yet when Protestants look at Catholic practice, they find it pretty hard to make them out. In my experience, the average Catholic cannot identify the core of the Gospel without guiding questions, even though it’s there implicitly. Any neutral observer will agree that Catholics generally have a long way to go in catching up with their Protestant brothers and sisters on these scores. To the Protestant, I admit that it is shameful that Catholics do not exemplify these qualities as they should. But God’s covenants are about God, not humans. If we were all judged on our moral and theological failings, who could stand? If we think ourselves fit to throw the first stone, we will find it shatters our own house of glass.
Another, more practical objection might be that this vision for reunification is simply unrealistic. But look. If you sat down a 1600s intellectual and pitched a form of government where the people live in semiautonomous states with democratically elected leaders, and these states contribute representatives to a national government that both depends on the states and enforces its own laws, and that this whole system would be led by a combination of a nationally-elected President, state representatives, and a collection of judges with lifetime appointments, I suspect that by the time he managed to work out what you were describing, he would be laughing uproariously. And when you’d try to explain how the electoral college, the division of the representatives into two groups, and limited terms help the monstrosity stay balanced, you would be drowned out by hoots and howls. New ways of structuring large-scale institutions require enormous creativity, not to mention a thousand fine tunings in the form of tweaks, caveats, and stipulations to make things run. This should not be daunting to Catholics; after all, you can already earn a degree and a living just studying the laws of the Church.
My proposal might also be called unrealistic because Protestants are on the whole generally uninterested in entering communion with Rome. Much of this, I think, has to do with the failure of most Catholics to exhibit what Protestants tend to respect in Christians, namely, the distinctives outlined above. But at an even deeper level, Protestants are uninterested in Rome because they see it as irrelevant. I have heard Catholics smugly ask, “Protestant? And just what are you Protesting?” The implication being that Protestants are merely defined in the negative against the positive expression of Christianity found in the Catholic Church. As if we were just Catholics with doctrines cut out. But I respond by noting that most Protestants think of Rome not at all. Tellingly, Evangelicals usually don’t even think of themselves as “Protestants,” but simply “Christians.” The truth is that if Catholics did embody the biblicism, Gospel-focus, and zeal for Christ that Evangelicals do, Evangelicals would start taking them seriously. But my proposal doesn’t hinge on that. The Catholic Church should undertake to build the Reformation Rites without being asked. We must build the houses before we ask the inhabitants to move in. Until we have done so, the invitation to come and dwell is not credible. The Church should work with representatives of each Protestant tradition who have entered communion with Rome to develop suitable means for welcoming that tradition in while preserving its charisms.8 It is an ambitious vision, but I take heart in the fact that God has overcome the world. I am at least half confident He can manage the same with the Church.
Why I’m Entering the Church
[Added Sept. 26, 2023: Since writing this section, I have rethought the main argument of the paragraph that follows. The best way for me to explain this change, however, is to allow you to retrace my steps. For this reason I have chosen to leave the paragraph as is, and add two new paragraphs following it in which my present self explains why my past self was mistaken.]
As things stand, I generally do not recommend Protestants enter the Roman Church. It is simply asking too much. I myself am only following through because I know my calling will require me to teach the Faith, and I won’t be able to do that in good conscience as a Protestant because I believe Catholic claims. But you might think this: “The Catholic Church does seem to have the credentials it asserts. Yet my own tradition is systematically better at the kind of formation and spiritual life I think Christians ought to have. So although I recognize I will be cut off from the full Eucharist, I shall bloom where I have been planted.” For all non-Anglican Protestants, I think this is a fair position. Some Protestants become Catholic and eagerly conform to Catholic culture, becoming twice as Catholic as they ever were Protestant. But many of us have no such interest. For us, entering the Roman Church promises deep loneliness. We are going where our language is not spoken, where our heroes are held in suspicion,9 and we are expected to participate in spiritual practices we don’t find natural or helpful, even if we no longer have major theological objections to them (I’m thinking of the Rosary/Marian devotion generally here). On the flip side, we are likely to be viewed with some degree of mistrust by other Evangelicals, who will almost certainly think of us as outsiders going forward.
[Isn’t my past self persuasive? He was sharp, but he was also wrong on one point. At the time, the pain, loneliness, and fear associated with leaving Protestantism for the Catholic Church were exercising an undue influence on my reasoning, which led me to an incorrect and even paternalistic recommendation. I correctly reasoned that immediately becoming Catholic would be a real spiritual danger for many Protestants, as it might be too much too quickly. But I incorrectly concluded that therefore the spiritually “weak” would be better off remaining Protestant. While this appears merciful, it fails in two key ways. The first is that I was writing before I had received First Communion, and there was just no way for me to predict the life-changing effect of taking the Eucharist. Every person is better off with the full sacraments than without. It inexorably follows that your life would be better off with the full sacraments, from which it follows that you should become Catholic. If you’re reading this as a Protestant, then this point will likely be difficult to resonate with. You are in the position I was, and I can appreciate that. You may find the second failure more salient. Treating people with full dignity means treating them as decision-makers, to be offered arguments and reasons rather than emotional manipulation. We are rational creatures, not mere animals. But sparing someone a painful truth in order to produce a desired result (i.e., continuing in undisturbed faith) is to make a judgment about which truths they deserve access to. Thus, I cannot claim to treat my Protestant friends and readers as equals if I will that they continue in what I know to be false simply because I deem it pastorally expedient.
Those are the two intellectual failures of my argument, but there is a third, practical failure. The truth is that most Protestants will not come help us build the Reformation Rites, so we will need everyone we can get. I am in the early days of putting together a network of people excited about this project to harness and direct our efforts—we would love to have you. So, on a pragmatic level, my dedication to this project requires that I encourage you to consider Return. But regardless, on a spiritual level, I must urge you to carefully, prayerfully, and thoughtfully consider entering the Catholic Communion. One thing I was not wrong about was how alienating and painful it would be. No one should have to face that alone. I would be happy to offer any support I can; feel free to reach out via my contact information at the end of the appendices. This closes my updated position paragraph. I will allow my past self (he really is so concise) to resume his essay.]
Because no structures exist already in the Catholic Church for people like me, I have had to carve out my own path, though thankfully aided by a handful of truly phenomenal Catholic Christians. I have steered away from words like “convert” since I am not going from death to new life, but rather continuing the process of working out my salvation with fear and trembling. I have also resisted the phrase “becoming Catholic,” or calling myself “Catholic” without qualification, as it sounds too much as though I am ceasing to be Reformed and Evangelical. I have continued attending an Evangelical church on Sunday mornings, and hope to stick to that practice wherever I land. I still read Luther and Calvin and their descendants. As often as I can, I opt for spontaneous prayer in group settings.10 I advocate for the Reformation Solas in Catholic circles, and introduce Evangelical vocabulary where appropriate.
I must head off the one reaction I do not want. The one thing I do not want my Protestant friends to do is say that, after all, Eric has always been a bit quirky about these things, and he always did like intellectual substance and structure—this is just the natural result of him looking to feel more at home. This rush to make disagreement a matter of taste is a perfect illustration of what I said earlier about Protestantism’s future. It is also patronizing—might I not believe it because I think it really true? But, in any case, this response has a mistaken premise. I do not at all feel at home in the Catholic Church. Spiritually, I have felt like a man who learns on a beautiful day that a flood will soon put his town underwater. The blue skies make it hard to pack up and flee, whatever his reason tells him about its necessity. Intellectually, I feel like a man who discovers the plot of land he has been living on actually stretches for miles and miles all around. He is already living where he needs to be, but it comes with much more to enjoy than he first realized. Trusting my reason over my feelings in this matter has been one of the hardest things I have ever done. I have read my Bible more, and prayed more, over these past two years of discernment than ever before. I do not particularly like the Mass, or Catholic spirituality in general. I am most at home in Evangelical Presbyterianism. If this were a matter of taste, Rome would be far down on my list.
I should also reiterate that I have said little about the actual content I believe we stand to gain from the Catholic tradition. I mentioned some theologically pragmatic reasons and named a few of the false beliefs about Catholicism that I have let go of, but it would be a separate project to chronicle how I got to where I am. I can nod to a few of my guides, however. Chief among them is G.K. Chesterton. His fiction gave me the persistent sense that his world had more colors and higher heavens than mine. Michael Ward, a C.S. Lewis scholar and priest of the Ordinariate, helped me see the continuity between my current spiritual life and what I could have in Rome. Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI, showed me in his book Eschatology that Catholic resources open up rich, exciting dimensions for biblical interpretation, while The Spirit of the Liturgy deepened my understanding of what Sunday mornings ought to be, and how the Mass is a participation in God’s cosmic liturgy. But of course none of these were a substitute for the powerful force of meeting Catholics whom I could respect as Christians and call true friends. To Marcus and Noah and Meredith and Father Zack, I owe more than I can say.
Concluding Reflections
Can the two sticks come together? Can Judah and Israel, Rome and Reformation, become one again? I think so. The Church is in her early history yet. I suspect we are far, far away from the end of things. There may come a day when Christians look back at us and marvel at how close we were to the Incarnation, to Moses and Abraham. They will, I hope, give thanks to God for His gracious, unsearchable work knitting us back together. If Evangelicals cannot find a way to come into communion with Rome, I fear we will very slowly pass out of existence, unable to definitively and unequivocally reject false teachings from within and without. We hate the prosperity gospel, but lack the ability to condemn it with universal authority. Worse yet, we have exported it to the rest of the world, where it has taken horrible root in some of the poorest countries. How many similar movements can we handle as the years go by? On the other hand, if the Catholic Church does not find a way to welcome us in, no doubt God will preserve her. But she will suffer spiritual brittleness, as her beautiful rituals become dry without a fresh drink of the living water that Evangelicals find their whole identity in pouring forth.
I do not expect this to happen in my lifetime, or the lifetime of my children. Evangelicals think in five-year increments; the Catholic Church thinks in centuries, millennia. I cautiously hope that the great-great-grandchildren of my Protestant friends will be able to enjoy the fruits of these labors. If any Protestants are brave enough to come with me and call themselves Reformation Catholics, I welcome them. Otherwise, we shall be forced to do what God’s people have always done: wait upon the Lord, till He passes by and does a new thing.
Lent, 2023
When I finished the original essay, I realized that it would be incomplete without at least the beginnings of actual theological work. This grew into a collection of appendices tackling various questions my main argument was forced to leave hanging. Appendix 2 is by far the most important. You can find them all here.
I speak only of theological Liberals, with no direct comment on political or philosophical positions that happen to share the name.
I put “angels” in scare quotes because Liberals do not tend to believe in literal spiritual creatures that can do things like, say, advertise fruits or hijack bodies. The fact that Jesus believed this is a forgivable quirk of his unenlightened times.
I know this isn’t the right movie, but relax, ok? It just worked too well to pass up.
By the by, this is much closer to Calvin’s Calvinism than T.U.L.I.P. ever came.
For those not familiar with Catholic lingo, “celebrate” is the word used to describe performing the Mass, or administering any of the sacraments.
His name is Roger Mohrlang. He is a celebrity among the Kamwe—I have heard from other Whitworth professors that the Kamwe once threw him a birthday party attended by 15,000 people. I’ve seen pictures from the event and the stories check out. I have also heard that students used to debate which theology professor would win in a fight, and the answer was always, “Roger, because he would just call down fire from heaven.”
Although we do not use this word (or “pious”) much at all. Instead, we tend to talk about “becoming Christ-like” or “being sanctified”.
Or special Christian gifts/callings.
Except C.S. Lewis. Everyone likes him.
For Evangelicals not familiar with the distinction, “spontaneous prayer” is prayer that is not a memorized, pre-written prayer, like the Lord’s Prayer. It is what we typically just call “prayer.”