Over the past decade I’ve witnessed several evangelical acquaintances convert to Romanism or Eastern Orthodoxy. And beyond this I’ve noticed it as a larger phenomena happening with evangelicals in general. High profile individuals include men like Peter Kreeft, Scott Hahn, Rod Dreher, and Hank Hanegraaf (the Bible Answer Man). All men of extraordinary capabilities intellectually and rhetorically. And all men I respect and appreciate, especially Peter Kreeft. This can be disconcerting to some evangelicals witnessing the trend. Are these men denying the faith? Are they no longer Christians? Have they discovered some truth that I’m unaware of? Have they discovered the fullness of faith?
For various reasons this has caused me to spend the past few years reading up on the claims of Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy. And also reading Protestant objections. I still continue to read and inquire and do not pretend to be an expert apologist or anything like that. But I’ve come to a point where I am becoming more and more convinced that the claims of Rome and the Eastern churches are not satisfying enough for the honest seeker of truth. This is not to say that I believe these churches are apostate or non-Christian. Or that the men who have converted have forfeited the faith. I continue to love them as brothers, but brothers in error. It is to say that the I have found the reasons for their conversions and the claims of these respective churches not enough to make me swim the Tiber or journey East as a catechumen.
This will be the first in a series which will briefly explain each of my reasons for why I am not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox (EO). Some of them overlap. Some are specific to one of the traditions.
Authority
This is the primary reason for myself, and the fundamental reason that many converts cite for their conversion. This is the crux of the matter. Everything flows from this, I think.
For Rome the ultimate authority is the magisterium, the official teachings of the Church. And connected to this is the authority of the Bishop of Rome who is the head of the Church on earth. He is capable of speaking infallibly from the chair, which I’m told has only happened a few times. So, it isn’t as if the Pope is infallible in everything he says, a popular misunderstanding. But for Rome the authority of the Church’s teachings in communion with the Bishop of Rome, the magisterium, is the highest authority. For Eastern Orthodoxy the highest authority is somewhat different, in that they do not have a Pope figure, but it’s similar in that Tradition is the highest authority. Encompassed in that Tradition is the Apostolic witness found in Scripture. Scripture is part of Tradition along with the seven ecumenical councils of the early church era. So, both Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy (EO) place Scripture on the same level or on equal footing with their traditions.
This is a simplistic way of stating it, but I think I’m rearticulating their positions accurately. If any Papists or Easterners are pulling their hair out reading this, please chime in and help me understand better.
The problem with these positions is that these traditions at times appear to go beyond or even contrary to what we know Jesus and the Apostles taught. And how do we know what they taught? We have their letters and biographies written down in what we call the Bible. And so when I hear some of the claims that Romanists and EO’s make that seem to be contrary or beyond what I read from Paul or Mark, I am going to side with Paul and Mark over the Bishop of Rome or the Bishop of Moscow. It’s that simple.
What I just described is commonly called Sola Scriptura. Scripture alone. And this does not mean that Scripture is our only authority. Some have suggested Prima Scriptura as a more accurate way to convey the meaning. Scripture is not our only authority, but it is our highest authority. I happily acknowledge and revere the authority of reason, tradition, history, natural law, intuition, dreams, visions, miracles, and more. But these are secondary and tertiary authorities. They exist in a kingdom as princes, lords, bishops, and knights, with Jesus as King, and his authority over us is primarily mediated through Scripture.
Are You Your Own Pope? Why Yes. Yes I Am. And So Are You.
The more I explore these issues, the more I come to a profound appreciation for this glorious doctrine recovered at the Reformation. It is not because I was raised a charismatic/evangelical or trained in a reformed seminary that I cherish this doctrine. I have not set out to defend a doctrine because it’s what I was taught growing up or in seminary. It is that I have genuinely sought truth, and found that my tradition already had it in spades. With the core doctrines, I come back again and again to that old familiar vanilla evangelicalism and find it was home all along. I have experienced what T. S. Eliot wrote in his Four Quartets.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
A common objection to Sola Scriptura would be that the individual is setting himself up as a kind of Pope. That the individual has supreme authority over what Scripture means. “Do you know more than the teachings of all the fathers?,” the Romanist says. “Are you wiser than 2,000 years of tradition?,” the EO says. “Except for you is all the church in error?,” John Eck says. In contrast, the Romanist submits himself, in a great act of humility, to the magisterium of the Church. Or the EO submits himself to the Apostolic Tradition of the Church. And there I am thinking I know more than everyone else. Of course, none of this is true.
I would reply that both the Papist and the EO exercise that same individual “Pope-like” faculty of authority, of adjudicating what is true themselves. They have to make an individual judgment on the meaning of Scripture, history, experience, etc. in order to arrive at the decision to submit to their respective traditions. In other words, everyone judges for themselves on some level the meaning of anything. Everyone is using their individual reasoning to determine which authority they are going to submit to. The difference being where someone arrives.
This does not mean that truth is subjective. It is not. Truth exists objectively apart from opinion. However, everyone uses subjective reasoning, and that subjective reasoning is a God-given faculty that we are to use in conjunction with faith and the Holy Spirit in order to align our thinking to objective reality, to seek out what is objectively true, and good, and beautiful.
Different Authority, Same Problems
This connects to a further problem among the Papists and EO. They will often object that there is something wrong with the thousands of Protestant denominations and so we need some kind of authority to bring us into unity, and the unified teachings of the Roman Church or Eastern Churches are here to relieve us of that burden of disunity and Protestant chaos.
The problem is their churches also have disunity and chaos. While this appeal to an authority which gets rid of all the wacky interpretations of Scripture sounds nice and has a seductive apologetic pull to it, the reality is those problems don’t go away in those churches. There is a broad range of different interpretations of the magisterium or the Tradition of the Church. You have liberals and conservatives, traditionalists and Marxists, in the Roman Church. There are many Roman Catholics who believe contraception is okay, homosexual marriage is okay, abortion is okay. Their theologians and clergy believe and practice all kinds of aberrant doctrines. The popular theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, who was involved in Vatican II, in his writings strongly suggested that the disciples converted because they felt the forgiveness of Christ in their life, and not that they literally saw the risen Christ. By all appearances, plainly teaching that the resurrection of Jesus was not an actual, literal, event. Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest, is notorious for his pandering to the LGBT community. You can even be the Pope and say that divorce and remarried Roman Catholics can take communion!
If you want to see these kinds of things well documented check out the last chapter of Kenneth Collins and Jerry Walls book Roman but Not Catholic. You can essentially believe whatever you want and continue to be a member, and even the Pope, of the Roman Catholic Church. Collins and Walls describe the Roman church as the largest liberal Protestant denomination, and I think this is true.
The Eastern Churches have similar problems with their nationalism. And the different national churches are functionally denominations. With this comes a whole slew of similar kinds of problems. For example, In 2018, the Russian Orthodox Church cut off full communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Now, I’m not critiquing national churches or desires to be unified, but I am pushing back against the idea that the Eastern Churches give unity because of the authority of their tradition, or the Roman churches give unity because of their magisterium. Carl Trueman, in an article rightly said, “At least Protestantism has the integrity to wear its chaotic divisions on its sleeve.”
So, while there may be institutional unity of a sort, there is not doctrinal unity as the Romanists purport, and in the East there isn’t even institutional unity in some cases. One may argue that Rome also has forms of institutional disunity. The Society of Saint Pious X rejects the liturgical reforms of Vatican II. The Sedevacantists believe the Holy See has been vacant since 1958. All the popes since that time have been too heretical for their liking. They have the same difficulties Protestants have in interpreting Scripture. They just shift those difficulties from Scripture to the magisterium, or from Scripture to Tradition. So, one does not escape the problem of authority in these churches. One simply adds layer upon layer between yourself and the Scriptures.
Furthermore, it is not abundantly clear what the official teachings in the Roman Church are. Is it the Council of Trent? Vatican I? Vatican II? The teachings of the early church fathers? It is an impossibility to clarify these things and to harmonize them. The early church fathers taught a variety of things the Roman Church does not believe now. Should we delay baptism out of the terror of post-baptismal sin as Tertullian suggested or Constantine practiced? They did not have one voice. There is core agreement, but not agreement on everything. And that core agreement is in line with what many Protestants believe. Lutherans believe in baptismal regeneration. Anglicans believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Protestants can claim the early fathers just as much as Rome or the Eastern churches. Anyone who tells you they believe what the Church has believed in all times and in all places is usually failing to appreciate that the common denominator of what the Church has believed in all times and in all places is very basic and also held by most Protestants. We believe in Jesus, prayer, worship, communion, baptism, and the Scriptures, like the Church has throughout the ages. But once you start getting into particulars on what baptism looks like, how the supper is to be administered, what the worship service looked like, icons in worship, you start to see a divergence of views among the fathers and throughout all of history, and that’s okay.
The language of Trent is very different if not entirely opposed to the language of Vatican II. The Roman Church has declared things to be essential to the Christian faith, to be dogma, like the Marian dogmas, as recently as the past couple hundred years. This has required them to adopt John Henry Newman’s concept of the development of doctrine. And so the ostensibly unchanging teachings of the Roman Church have changed over time and we know not what they may teach in the future. This is one of the reasons C. S. Lewis said he could never become a Roman Catholic. I don’t know what I’m committing to in the future!
Arriving Where We Started
The clearest way to deal with these things, to my mind, has already been answered for us in the Reformation. A return to the Scriptures. There is no question of their infallible authority, and so we defer to them as the governing authority. This has created the plurality of denominations within Protestantism, but as a Protestant (or as I prefer to call us, Reformed Catholics), I don’t have to pretend our churches are the infallible interpreters of Scripture. We simply say the Scriptures are infallible alone. Christ has given the Church elders, teachers, and pastors to instruct us, and they do so by being as faithful as they can to Jesus, the Apostles, and Prophets, as found in Scripture, and guided by the Holy Spirit. But I have the Holy Spirit, too, and if my elder is teaching something clearly contrary or beyond the Word then it is no longer authoritative.
The desire for an authority to unify often comes from witnessing the proliferation of denominations within Protestantism. To this, I reply, so what? There are different tribes in Protestantism. There were different tribes in Israel. And the different tribes in Protestantism aren’t really that many. You basically have Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed, Baptists, Evangelicals (think non-denominational types), Charismatics, Pentecostals, and Anabaptists. Those are the ten major tribes. You add the Papists and the Eastern Orthodox and you have twelve!
The tribes of Israel were many, but they were one. They battled with each other, but they were still God’s people. New Covenant Israel is similar. Many tribes, one people. You might even say Protestantism is more Trinitarian in that there is unity and diversity acknowledged in how we view the Church. Much of conservative Protestantism is united on the essentials of the faith. We pray, we worship, the Scriptures are preached, we baptize, we partake of the Eucharist, and we recognize the mere Christianity we all share. In this sense, we are more catholic than Roman Catholics. We recognize the fullness of the Church. While at the same time we worship in our own particular varied expressions. The Roman and Eastern Churches, in their current beliefs on authority, are obstacles to unity, not facilitators of it.
I do desire more doctrinal and institutional unity. And we should labor toward that end. But perhaps we will never have it. Perhaps this is simply the best way to organize the Church until Christ comes again to judge the quick and the dead. Perhaps an ecumenical Protestantism with a back-bone is the kind of unity that our High Priest prayed for (John 17). I’m not sure, but I’m not overly bothered by the fact that Presbyterians are New Covenant Benjamites and Charismatics are New Covenant Judah. We’re all the Israel of God. So, the reality of different tribes of the Church is not reason enough for me to convert from my tribe to another tribe which claims infallible authority in their traditions and magisterium, and claims to resolve the problem of disunity with that authority. Both of which are untrue.
The final thing I’ll say is that I think this desire for institutional infallible authority can be a coward’s way out of doing the hard work of laboring for truth. People convert for all kinds of reasons, and I’m not going to get into all those reasons, from a psychological perspective. But I do think there can be some kind of insecurity in your relationship with the Lord when you desire to have men rule over you infallibly. There is a joy that comes from wrestling with God’s word on your own and seeking the Holy Spirit’s guidance directly through prayer and fasting. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, we are to submit to our elders and the Church and to learn from them. Yes, we are to be under the authority of our local Church rulers, but when those rulers substantially deviate from the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles our submission has to be to Christ’s words first and foremost as revealed in the Bible.
The Reformers were right when they said the Bible is sufficient for salvation. We have everything we need with regards to authority in the Bible. And we don’t need a magisterium or ecumenical councils to tell us what it means, however useful and in agreement with Scripture they may be. God has given us reason and His Holy Spirit who leads us into all truth. And so we are capable of pursuing truth, not as islands, but in the context of the broader Church, with the company of the saints now, the saints in Church history, and the saints who wrote the Bible.
Feller of Trees 