Friday Review: Is the Reformation Over? 3

Chapter 2 of Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom's book, Is the Reformation Over? is called "The Historic Standoff." In this chapter, Noll and Nystrom catalog the ongoing hostilities that have existed historically between Protestants and Catholics in the years prior to Vatican II.

1. The chapter begins as it ends: with pictures of the situation between Protestants and Catholics in the mid-twentieth century. This 1945 quote from Carl McIntyre captures the dominant Protestant tone of the last five hundred years: "the greatest enemy of freedom and liberty that the world has to face today is the Roman Catholic system. Yes, we have Communism in Russia and all that is involved there, but if one had to choose between the two ... one would be much better off in a communistic society than in a Roman Catholic Fascist set up" (38).

By the way, this election season--as all election seasons--is a golden time to be teaching philosophy. Election campaigns and logical fallacies almost go hand in hand. The favorite fallacy is of course the ad hominem fallacy where you attack the person rather than the position. The feeble of mind on both sides are currently being inundated with emails and phone calls of malarchy about how so and so is really Dr. Evil. You know, "Did you know that Joe Politician snuck out his/her window one Friday night in high school and attended a Hare Krishna rally (by the way, did you know that the Hare Krishna are secretly communist)."

Just remember--anyone who just buys whatever that email or phone call says is not a good thinker and is a dangerous voter. Your vote is not your vote but the vote of those who are manipulating you (and no doubt laughing about how stupid you are). A good thinker will assume that anything you receive in this format is false. Only things that are aired in a public forum where they can be critiqued by the opposition are truly trustworthy (which eliminates any number of radio and cable shows). "A word to the wise is sufficient"--no amount of words can convince the dimwitted.

To continue, President Truman's appointment of a representative to the Vatican in 1946 was similarly greeting with rumbles all along the Protestant spectrum. Etc... Most of the chapter is simply a compounding of evidence for what most of us already know--Protestants and Catholics have not gotten along well these last five hundred years. Even this week I heard of a casual conversation at Marion High School in which a Protestant student critiqued a Catholic student for his worship of Mary.

Of course Catholics are not supposed to worship Mary. What they really believe is that Mary and the saints help their prayers. I have no idea whether this is the case--and of course God doesn't really need any help hearing--but I don't find the view objectionable any more than the idea that God might use angels as intermediaries with the world. People get angry over these sorts of things because it's traditional to get angry over these things, not because there's anything substantial to get angry about.

2. Noll and Nystrom then go on to give some of the "long history" of evangelical-catholic fighting. Their summary of the rhetoric of the Reformation will sound very familiar:

Protestants about Catholics

• salvation by good works
• don't let common person read Bible
• manufactured saints and rites over Bible
• made Mary a coauthor of salvation
• forced new doctrines at the whim of popes and councils
• promoted a corrupting, despotic power structure

Catholics about Protestants

• their salvation by faith denied the need for holiness before God
• let any Tom, Dick, and Mary come up with their own interpretation of the Bible
• denied the Holy Spirit reveals things in church times as well as Bible times
• denied God's gracious help through Mary and the saints
• rejected apostolic authority in preference for rationalism and moral anarchy
• foolishly neglected God's gracious help through the seven sacraments
• chose individualism over genuine church leadership

3. The next section talks about attitudes in early America--more of the same, of course. Foxe's Book of Martyrs is mentioned for the way it listed Protestants who died at the hands of Catholics to the long historical list (we know, of course, that before the Reformation was done, many Catholics died at the hands of Protestants as well).

Paul Dudley's 1750 legacy to Harvard provided for a lecture devoted to "detecting and convicting and exposing the Idolatry of the Romish Church, Their Tyranny, Usurpations, damnable Heresies, fatal Errors, abominable Superstitions, and other crying Wickednesses in their High Places; and Finally that the Church of Rome is that mystical Babylon, That Man of Sin, That apostate Church spoken of, in the New Testament" (43).

Noll and Nystrom tell how much flack Charles Hodge received in the 1800's when he, despite rejecting Roman Catholicism, considered Roman Catholic baptism to be legitimate, also assuming that there were some legitimate Christians who were also Roman Catholic.

4. The next section shows the connection that almost inevitably seems to be forged by the human animal between religion and civil concerns.

I might note that to the extent to which a person of professed faith connects their faith to specific political bodies, especially of a civil sort, to that extent I question the purity of their faith. A person who lock steps their faith to either the Democratic or Republican party for example, is in my mind a person whose faith is not pure, whose faith is syncretistic. They have let cultural matters spread like a cancer in their faith. Such people's faith changes with the tide of human affairs.

Noll and Nystrom give two exemplary quotes in this section:

The first is from George Whitefield, who preached a sermon in 1746 Philadelphia thanking God for rescuing the British from the "Catholic monarchy" by leading the British to vanquish Bonnie Prince Charlie in Scotland:

"How soon would our pulpits every where have been filled with these old antichristian doctrines, free-will, meriting by works, transubstantiation, purgatory, works of supererogation, passive-obedience, non-resistance, and all the other abominations of the whore of Babylon" (46).

The second is a 1756 quote from Aaron Burr Sr., president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton:

"We have heard of the Policy and Perfidy of France, of her arbitrary Power, Popish tyranny and Bigotry... Their established religion is Popery; which, beside all its other Corruptions, disposes them from Principle, to be cruel to Protestants."

This section gives many other examples during the times of the Civil War where such rhetoric associating Catholicism with tyranny and anti-democratic rhetoric was used.

5. Occasional Nice-Nice
Toward the end of the chapter, Noll and Nystrom do show occasionally moments when Protestants and Catholics were more hospitable to each other.

For example, I had never heard of the Council of Regensburg in 1541, where a group of Protestant and Catholic leaders sat down and actually reached an agreement on the issue of justification by faith. Even John Calvin admitted that something significant had occurred. Of course the Council of Trent in the late 1540's would seal the separation from the Catholic side, if it was not already sealed from the Protestant side.

Protestants have continued to read Catholic authors. Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas a Kempis were read by individuals like Martin Luther and John Wesley. Even after the split, people like George Whitefield, John Newton, and Charles Wesley read Blaise Pascal, a Catholic. Evangelicals read post split Catholic mystics like Francois Fenelon and Madam Guyon.

We Wesleyans know that John Wesley used some of the same harsh language against the Roman Church as others, but Noll and Nystrom choose to highlight his indictment of those who utterly destroy brotherly love in their abominable polemics toward it.

Meanwhile, Roman Catholics have also from time to time admired Protestant thinkers as well. A Catholic periodical in Munich in the mid-1800's praised the Protestant Francois Guizot's historical accuracy, adding the words that "one is often astonished" at his fairness (51).

Kenneth Scott Latourette's 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Association was scorned by most, but praised by Catholic priests present with the remark, "the theology was perfect."

We end the review of chapter 2 with this comment by the notorious Cardinal John Henry Newman, who famously converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in the late 1800's:

"I can but bow before the great mystery that those are divided here [Protestant and Catholic] and look for the means of grace and glory in such different directions, who have so much in common in faith and hope" (55).