Bound in Love

Protestants

Here in the 21st century we do not generally refer to Protestants as heretics. We are more likely to refer to them as our Protestant brothers and sisters. But it is included as a heresy by all three of our primary sources. So why is that?

Our friend Hilaire Belloc thinks it deserves to be included among the great heresies because:

Number one, it was not a particular heresy which could be debated and exploded and then condemned by the authority of the church — which had been up to that point the case for every other heresy or heretical movement. Neither, on the other hand, had it been condemned as a separate religion, like Islam and the Albigensian movement. So it has to be a generalized heresy because it’s not completely separated from Christianity.

Number two, while there were many different details within the various breakaway Christian communities that we call the Protestants and they call the reformed churches, they all flow from one main principle: a denial of the Catholic Church’s spiritual authority. None of the older heresies did that.

Mainly in northern European countries, and in the United States historically, Catholics were a small minority after the disruptions of the 16th and 17th centuries. In these Protestant countries, the majority was aware of the distinction with the minority Catholics, and they felt a sharp division between themselves and the minority. The first hundred years of this break saw nearly continuous war because neither side thought that division was a long-term answer, so both sides were interested in overpowering the other so as to impose Catholicism on the Protestants or Protestantism on the Catholics. It was in the year 1648 that they came up with the Peace of Westphalia, which ended those wars and accepted that some countries were going to be Catholic while some countries were going to be Protestant.

This was a big change from Europe’s history. No longer would a united West confront threats from Islam, but it would over time be nation states organized by their confession that would come together to form alliances for aggression or for defense. We recently celebrated the feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary, which was September 12. That date commemorates the victory in 1683 over the Islamic Turks. When the Pope was trying to rally armed forces to help defend Vienna from the attack, there were many powerful nations to whom he could not turn because they were not Catholic anymore.

Politics certainly played a big part in this rupture in the Western church. It’s most clearly seen in the English church, separating itself from the Catholic Church because the English king was facing domestic political threats, and he needed to make some changes that the church would not approve.

Politics had already been playing a part in the centuries prior to Martin Luther’s act of Reformation when he posted his theses on the chapel door in Wittenberg Germany. The Pope had abandoned Rome as the seat of the papacy and had come under the domination of the French King. The plague had ravaged all of Europe, reducing its population by as much as a third. This was the period in which national languages were beginning to replace Latin as the language of official government documents. We begin to see the rise of English as a distinct language used by the upper classes, and likewise in France and Italy we see the development of distinct languages and the slow convergence of other dialects towards that national language.

Belloc identifies John Calvin as the linchpin for the establishment of a Protestant church separate from and rejecting the Catholic Church. Prior to Calvin, the Reformation had been an internal family quarrel about bad practices such as indulgences and simony. Calvin wrote a book in which he laid out a new faith. Some of Calvin’s positions did not remain in force for later generations of Calvinists and other Protestants, but he did reject the Catholic teaching of free will and insisted that there is only one will in the universe and everything is predestined. Calvin preached what we might call “prosperity theology”: God wants you to do well in this world. Calvin published his book about 20 years after Luther posted his complaints. This was a turning point because the initial part of the movement had been negative — a revolt against the corruption and worldliness of the official church — but Calvinism was a combatant external to and against the Catholic Church.

Our second author, M. L. Cozens, makes a distinction between Protestantism and Anglicanism, so let’s examine that. He says that people would generally agree that the central characteristics of Protestants would be its rejection of sacramental theory, or its claim to the right of private interpretation of the Scriptures, but he focuses on its denial of the Catholic doctrine of grace.

The doctrine of grace is — in a nutshell — that we were created with sanctifying grace and lost it by our own choice in the original sin and so fell from a supernatural state to a natural state, retaining our essential powers of intellect and will, though now darkened by the consequence of the Fall, and therefore unable to by our own efforts get back into right relationship with our Creator. And thus God sent his only begotten Son to do for us what we could not do for ourselves, and regain that grace through the sacrament of baptism and maintain access to it through the sacramental life.

Martin Luther, as we know, was an Augustinian monk. He might be diagnosed these days as manic-depressive for he would alternate between complete laxity and severe penance. Eventually he decided to cease all his efforts at penance and amendment; he put all his trust for his salvation in Christ’s redemption alone. In a classic case of extrapolating one’s own personal situation globally, Luther had found his own passions hard to combat, he was weak in the face of temptation. So his solution was to teach that the fall had so completely ruined man’s nature that it was hopelessly corrupt. He said that man’s will was so far from being free that he was equally unable to reject the inspirations of God or the temptations of the devil. Since man’s nature was so corrupt, it was only God’s grace that could elevate him back to the relationship for which he had been made.

One good way to think of this is that the Church teaches that God for Christ’s sake imparts holiness. Luther taught that God for Christ’s sake imputes holiness to the center. In the Catholic understanding, God’s grace is always the first movement but we are invited to cooperate with that movement. Luther saw us as unable to do anything, so all we could do is accept that movement. That is where he came up with his image of us being piles of dung that are covered with snow. And, as I have said before here, a more accurate picture is a beautiful snowflake that has allowed some dung to disfigure it but has access to a powerful cleaner in the sacraments.

Now, to the Church of England. This is more clearly a struggle between church and state in the eyes of the author. The struggle had been going on for centuries: Kings had claim the right to appoint bishops; kings had interfered with papal elections; kings had blocked the promulgation of a papal edict; but all these were done on the pretense of safeguarding their own secular rights and they always professed deference to the Holy See and its spiritual jurisdiction. It was only in England under King Henry VIII that a monarch dared to attack the doctrine of the church’s visible unity, or dare to create from the church’s unity a separate body in which the king would be both the king and the Pope.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider as a few other isms to Protestantism. His summary of generalized Protestant systems is this: they maintain justification by faith alone; Scripture is the sole rule of faith; the hierarchical structure of the church is rejected; the primacy of the Pope is rejected; there are not seven sacraments (and sometimes there aren’t any); the dogmas of transubstantiation and the sacrificial character of the mass and purgatory and veneration of saints are all discarded, and the disciplines of a consecrated and celibate priesthood, prayer for the dead, and holy images are generally discarded.

Bishop Schneider notes that Protestantism arose alongside humanism, and frequently they combined into something we can identify. There was an Italian Renaissance humanist and theologian named Sozzini who rejected the Trinity, the incarnation, redemption, original sin, and he rejected justification, infant baptism, and all but two sacraments. So this is sort of a non-Trinitarian Christian movement, and we see something like this in modern day Mormonism. Continuing along those lines is Unitarianism. The Unitarians teach that God is the unique creator of the universe and that Jesus was a great teacher of moral thought but he is not coequal with God.

Moderns

What do we mean by “the Moderns” or “Modernism?” Hillaire Belloc says it not a particular heresy like Arianism – rejection of one part of the faith. He says it is not a generalized heresy like Protestantism – rejection of the Church’s authority and the all the dependent teachings that flow from that. He describes it as a wholesale assault on the fundamentals of the Faith, and he sees that the opponents see the contest as a zero-sum game: victory or death are the only two choices.

M. L. Cozens identifies two academic disciplines as critical to the advance of Modernism. He says one is biology, and the other is textual criticism. He puts the textual critics this way:

Instead of holding firmly that God’s revelation is infallibly true, and that all other truth must eventually be found in harmony with it, they decided that whatever in Christian doctrine was out of harmony with the spirit of the age must go, or be harmonized with it.

Instead of leaving the Church, the Moderns decided to reinvent it so that it fit in the new Modern Age. Cozens attributes this to new philosophical schools of thought that rejected the simple logic and common sense reality of St. Thomas Aquinas in favor of limiting a human person’s intellect to knowing phenomena (things we can experience), and confirming the reality of these phenomena and the truths we draw from them is ultimately impossible. By keeping the intellectual focus on the physical world, there is no need to consider anything above nature.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider offers a summary description of Modernism, and then he breaks apart its many various currents. The summary is:

Christian dogma is historically contingent, continuously evolving, ultimately inexpressible in rational formulae, and ultimately discernible only on a subjective basis.

Here are a few of its currents:

Americanism: the tendency among American Catholics to try and fit in with the overall temperament (Protestant) of the United States by emphasizing natural virtues (instead of supernatural), minimizing certain points of doctrine so as to more easily get converts.

Communism: Based on the writings of Marx and Engels, it rejects private property, promotes materialism and leads to a totalitarian society. Condemned by Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius XI.

Darwinism: Pseudo-scientific theories of human origins through evolution. (The never have found that “missing link.”)

Materialism: A system that maintains that only observable matter is real, which means there is no spiritual realm. Thus, the mind is merely a chemical reaction. Marx and Engles built on the philosophy of Hegel to create “dialectical materialism” in which forces oppose, re-group, and overcome/evolve as history moves along its determined path.

Mormonism: The Church of the Latter-Day Saints reject the Trinity, original sin, and Christian baptism, but they justify polygamy.

Positivism: Created by the father of socialism (Auguste Comte), it is deist or pantheist regarding God and nature. Its philosophy is materialist and naturalist, rejecting the supernatural.

Indifferentism: It views all forms of religion as equal and fundamentally denies all categories of “true” and “false” regarding religion. Since there is not one one true religion, nobody is required to know it or follow it.