Arguing with Protestants
A few years ago, a cradle-Catholic friend heavily involved with apologetics asked for advice about a discussion he was having with a traditional Lutheran regarding the Bible and the Church. The Lutheran fellow didn’t hold what my friend regarded as the standard “Protestant view” of “Bible only” Christianity, so my friend couldn’t use his regular bag of apologetical tricks.
My only advice (apart from some book recommendations) was for my friend not to put his discussion partner’s views into a box labeled “The Protestant Position.” “Listen to what he says he believes and discuss things accordingly,” I said.
The alternative is to waste time arguing about a position the other fellow doesn’t really hold. Many Catholics don’t realize the range of diversity among Protestants even on subjects such as sola Scriptura. Which is one reason Catholics (especially those with an apologetical bent, like my friend) would benefit from Evangelical theologian Alister E. McGrath’s Reformation Thought.
A concise overview of the Reformation, the book will help Catholics avoid seeing the Reformation entirely through the prism of polemics on the one hand and the false irenicism of ecumenical excess on the other. The “conservative” or “traditional” Catholic often inclines to the former; the “liberal” or “progressive” Catholic to the latter.
Reformation Thought is, to be sure, only an introduction and, in the final analysis, the work of a partisan, in the best sense of that often pejorative term. McGrath writes as an Evangelical Protestant theologian of the Anglican variety, not really as a historian—-notwithstanding his ample and careful use of historians and historical analyses and his attempt to set Reformation ideas into historical context. Reformation Thought is, in the strict sense, a work of historical theology and one written from within a specific theological stance, even granting its author’s diligence in being evenhanded.
Even so, McGrath’s partisanship works to the advantage of the Catholic reader. Both Catholic polemical and hyper-ecumenist assessments of Protestantism distort the Reformation, though in opposite directions. The book’s Protestant commitment, though usually subdued and implicit, helps the Catholic polemicist fill in the missing color and detail of his often sketchy picture of the Reformation, while bringing out the sharper edges sometimes obscured in the hyper-ecumenist’s impressionist rendition.
McGrath maps the main contours of the Reformation terrain. The Lutheran and Reformed movements (otherwise known as the Magisterial Reformation because these movements relied on secular, civil authorities or magistrates to further their ends) are distinguished from the anti-establishment and even anarchical Radical Reformation of the Anabaptists and their fellow travelers. Then each camp’s positions on various Reformation hot-button issues (justification by faith, predestination, Scripture, the sacraments, the Church and the political order) are explained, with the Tridentine Catholic response usually thrown in (although McGrath’s treatment of the Catholic view is occasionally perfunctory).
Clarifying Things
The book clears up a number of misconceptions in the longstanding Catholic-Protestant debate. For example, regarding the doctrine of justification, Catholics and Protestants certainly differ and McGrath doesn’t gloss over it. But the differences aren’t as great as traditionally thought. Perhaps that conclusion seems insignificant in our age of ecumenical dialogues and given the recent Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on Justification. Nevertheless, many Lutherans (and other Protestants) and Catholics still don’t understand that we agree more than it might seem, nor do they always grasp where the disagreements really are.
Often people (whether Catholic or Protestant) reduce the question of justification to faith alone vs. faith plus works. Protestants are said to affirm “faith alone”; Catholics “faith plus works.” But that way of putting things can obscure the real beliefs of Protestants and Catholics. Both sides accept that justification occurs by grace alone, without any positive, merely human contribution. Both agree that justification is received by faith, which is itself a gift of grace. And both sides agree that the justified man ought, by God’s grace and power, to obey God and do good.
Yet Catholics and Protestants generally differ over whether, in addition to faith, love of God is necessary for justification. Catholics say love of God or charity needs to complete faith in order for faith to be salvific. Protestants appear to say it doesn’t, although at other times they seem to think that genuine saving faith includes some element of charity (though the Reformers as controversialists denied this.) They also differ over the nature of justification—-whether it is merely imputed or extrinsic (occurring outside of man), as Protestants hold, or imparted and intrinsic (occurring within man), as Catholics hold.
McGrath enters this debate only to explain what the various Reformers held on the subject, how they came to their views and how the Catholic Church responded to them. He doesn’t claim that the Catholic Church’s position was a crude Pelagianism or “works righteousness,” in which a man earns his own salvation and can compel God to accept him on the basis of his own righteousness. Nor does he dismiss Catholicism as “meriting the merit of Christ.” He acknowledges that, as far back as the sixth century, at the 2nd Council of Orange, the Catholic Church taught that justification comes by grace alone, without human contribution. The trouble is, argues McGrath, this teaching was obscured by contrary practice and the doctrinal confusion and failure of leadership of the late medieval Church.
McGrath acknowledges that Luther’s doctrine of forensic justification—that God only declares, rather than makes, man righteous—-broke with a thousand years of Christian teaching, including that of St. Augustine, on whom Luther in so many ways relied. But McGrath doesn’t pose the question of whether this break undercuts the validity of Luther’s doctrine or whether Luther was inconsistent or wrong on his own terms to see Augustine as the model for his understanding of biblical teaching about justification by grace. He summarizes the teaching of Trent fairly enough, but he never directly tackles the issue of whether the Reformation’s formulation of justification by grace through faith was strictly necessary to uphold the truths in question.
Scripture and Tradition
McGrath’s treatment of the Reformers’ views of Scripture is at once helpful and problematic. It is helpful because McGrath shows that only the Radical Reformation formally repudiated all tradition and Church authority in order to affirm the full authority of Scripture. The Magisterial Reformers accepted tradition and Church authority in a limited way (which explains my apologist friend’s difficulty in arguing with a traditional Lutheran; my friend’s arguments addressed the extreme view of the Radical Reformation).
Drawing on the Protestant scholar Heiko Oberman, McGrath distinguishes two views of tradition. First, there is Tradition 1 or tradition understood as the “traditional way of interpreting Scripture within the community of faith.” Such a view is compatible with what is called “the material sufficiency of Scripture,” a position which McGrath attributes to most medieval theologians. Material sufficiency of Scripture means that the Bible contains, in one way or another, everything essential to the Christian Faith. Tradition 1 amounts to “the traditional understanding of Scripture,” which helps the reader glean the essential elements from the Bible. Because in this view Scripture represents a single source of doctrine, albeit with the help of tradition, it is called the single-source theory.
Tradition 2, on the other hand, understands tradition as “a separate, distinction source of revelation, in addition to Scripture.” This involves what is called the two-source view of Scripture and tradition, with tradition providing data of revelation not included in the Bible. McGrath argues that the Magisterial Reformers rejected the two-source view of Scripture and tradition, not the single-source view. The Council of Trent, he argues, adopted the two-source theory, the “later, less-influential medieval view”; while the Reformers held to the more traditional (pardon the pun) view.
But there is a third position regarding tradition, which McGrath dubs “Tradition 0.” This is the view of the Radical Reformation, which as we have said rejected tradition and Church authority altogether as norms for belief. The Magisterial Reformers and the Catholic Church agreed in principle on rejecting Tradition 0 of the radicals.
Closely related to the issue of Scripture and tradition is the question of who has the right to interpret the Bible. McGrath contends that the Magisterial Reformers initially took a more egalitarian view, holding that the Bible is perspicuous and that every man could interpret it for himself, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But that “exegetical optimism” changed by the late 1520s, due to Luther and Zwingli’s dispute over the Bible’s teaching on the Eucharist. According to McGrath, the depth of their disagreement “demonstrated how difficult it was to reach agreement over the interpretation of even those passages of Scripture which Luther regarded as most straightforward.”
McGrath’s discussion is valuable, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t adequately address the issue of whether Tradition 1 is necessary or merely helpful when it comes to authentically interpreting the Bible. The Reformers accepted Tradition 1, but, as McGrath points out, “provided that this traditional interpretation could be justified” (emphasis in the original). In other words, the individual Reformer retained the right to stand in judgment on the tradition of the community of faith, if that tradition conflicted with the Reformer’s personal interpretation of Scripture.
Nor does McGrath adequately grapple with the other major weakness of the Reformation position here: the inability of anyone to speak objectively for the Church as such, when it comes to how Scripture should be understood. Even granting Tradition 1, it doesn’t follow that there is no divinely established teaching office to decide what is or isn’t in line with Tradition 1 or whether what purports to be genuine tradition is, in fact, tradition. Who decides what is the traditional view of the Church? Who decides the extent to which an interpretation of Scripture presented as “traditional” is binding? Are these questions to be left only to the individual exegete or pastor? If so, doesn’t the Magisterial Reformation affirmation of Tradition 1 practically collapse into Tradition 0? For even the Radical Reformers accepted views held by the Fathers of the Church or medieval theologians when they thought such views could be justified by Scripture.
McGrath’s treatment of the Catholic response regarding Scripture is problematic in other ways too. He summarizes what he regards as the Council of Trent’s position, but he says little about a much-controverted issue: whether Trent affirmed the one-source or two-source view of Scripture and tradition. Almost in passing, he states that “in recent years there has been a certain degree of ‘revisionism’ within Roman Catholic circles on this point, with several contemporary theologians arguing that Trent excluded the view that ‘the Gospel is only partly in Scripture and partly in the traditions’.” But he doesn’t tell us why this “revisionism” is unjustified (as he apparently thinks it is) and he refers only in a footnote to a single work, George Tavard’s Holy Writ or Holy Church? The Crisis of the Protestant Reformation. Nowhere are the arguments for the contrary interpretation of Trent engaged or even summarized.
As for the effect of Trent’s teaching, McGrath admits that it restored order “within its own ranks.” Yet he doesn’t say whether it slowed, halted or in some places reversed the spread of Protestantism. He also concedes that Trent enabled the Catholic Church “to speak with a single voice on matters of doctrine and biblical interpretation.” But he adds that it did so at a “high price”—-a powerful setback to Catholic biblical scholarship as compared with Protestantism.
Of course, many scholars—including some Catholics —would, to some extent, agree with McGrath’s assessment. Yet he leaves out half the picture. Post-Tridentine Catholic scholarship was hampered at times by an overly restrictive approach to biblical scholarship, but it was also spared the schism, conflict, confusion, heresy and radical skepticism that followed from Protestant biblical scholarship’s liberty. Radical demythologizing and biblical revisionism are also the progeny of Protestantism’s laissez faire approach to Scripture.
The Reformation and Science
McGrath is also eager to show how the Reformation contributed to the modern world, yet in doing so he often overstates his case. For example, according to McGrath, the Reformation all but invented modern science. He asserts that “the scientific revolution of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries rests firmly upon the religious ideas which came into being at the time of the Reformation….” But the evidence he adduces for this claim shows no such thing, nor does he engage the evidence for the medieval contribution to modern science in such figures as Robert Grosseteste, Adelard of Bath, Albert Magnus, Roger Bacon and Jean Buridan.
McGrath rests his case for the Reformation origin of science largely on Calvin, whom he says made two major contributions. On the one hand, Calvin supposedly positively encouraged the scientific study of nature through his emphasis on the orderliness of creation. On the other, he allegedly removed an obstacle to that study by supposedly doing away with biblical literalism and developing a theory of biblical accomodationism, in which God is thought to have accommodated himself in revelation to the ideas of the people of the time, rather than to have communicated scientific knowledge in Scripture.
But neither the orderliness of creation, nor God’s accommodating himself to man in revelation belongs to “the religious ideas which came into being at the time of the Reformation.” The great medieval and even patristic theologians affirmed both of these ideas. One might argue that certain aspects of Reformation thought fostered a deeper appreciate of these things-—though one could say the same thing about elements of the Catholic Reformation. But it is simply wrong to credit the Reformation with their discovery. And it is a mistake to ignore the medieval roots of modern science.
Moreover, Calvin’s contribution to feeling exegesis from literalism wasn’t as significant as McGrath makes out. Calvin’s “accomodationism” didn’t liberate him from literalism when it came to Genesis 1, as Father Stanley Jaki demonstrates in his work Genesis 1 Through the Ages. Calvin insisted on six literal days of creation and criticized those who taught that the “days” of the creation account were figurative. He also rejected figurative interpretations of the “waters above the firmament” in Genesis and argued that the clouds were suspended in air and prevented from falling on us by God.
But McGrath goes much further than merely crediting the Reformation with having invented science. He claims that Protestantism is more congenial to producing “first-class natural scientists” than Catholicism. As evidence, he refers to a “large body of sociological evidence stretching back more than a century,” but he cites no specific studies, nor does he show how such alleged differences between Protestantism and Catholicism are based on specifically Protestant or Catholic tenets, rather than other factors in cultures traditionally identified as Protestant or Catholic.
Conclusion
McGrath does a good job of summarizing the Reformation’s principle ideas. He tries to be fair to all sides of the Reformation debate, including the Church of the Middle Ages and of the Catholic Reformation, even while being honest by his treatment of the subject-matter where his own sympathies lie. So long as the Catholic reader knows he’s getting only half the story-—albeit recounted in a sincere and scholarly fashion—-Reformation Thought is a helpful primer and a genuine counter-balance to polemical Catholic treatments, excessively irenical ecumenical assessments, and secular renditions that minimize or ignore the power of theological ideas to revolutionize a culture.
Mark Brumley is managing editor of Catholic Dossier, where this article first appeared.
