What are popular online Protestant apologists today telling their coreligionists who are encountering Catholic critiques of their religious tradition? “Confessional Lutheran, published apologetics researcher, and Church History enthusiast” Javier Perdomo gave us one such glimpse in his interview on the Protestant YouTube channel Gospel Simplicity. In a video entitled “What’s the Protestant Response to Catholic Apologetics?”, Perdomo not only responded to some examples of what we might call “soundbite” Catholic apologetics, but also offered recommendations to Protestants struggling with how to navigate these debates.
Some of Perdomo’s advice is commendable and relevant for all ecumenical debate, regardless of one’s religious convictions. Despite being an online influencer, Perdomo urges viewers (and listeners) to get off their devices, touch grass, read, and pray—a worthy exhortation, given how much time we waste consuming content that does little more than elevate anxiety, or engaging in less-than-edifying debate that is little more than caricature and name-calling. He complains about Catholic over-simplifications and straw-manning of Protestants, which of course should be avoided—whatever we are debating, all sides should always charitably attempt to interact with the very best arguments our interlocutors can offer.
The interview features some responses to common Catholic criticisms of the Protestant position. These include the Catholic contention that Protestantism is hopelessly divided (Perdomo: Catholics are divided, too), or that the Protestant position reduces to individualism and subjectivity (Perdomo: Catholics suffer the same dilemma because they have to individually and subjectively identify the contents of and then interpret magisterial teaching).
I will not belabor here what has been written elsewhere on these topics. Rather, I would like to focus on what Perdomo says at the end of the interview, when he speaks to Protestants trying to determine how to work their way through these often complicated ecumenical debates, many of which originate in the Reformation itself. He encourages Protestants to read the catechisms of various Protestant traditions, as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He urges them to read the early Church Fathers and “most importantly” Scripture, because otherwise, “you’re not going to even be able to know who’s right.” He tells them to join a church and “submit yourself to whatever elder you’re under.”
In one sense, this advice resonates with me, because it’s similar to what I often offered others when I was a Presbyterian seminary student almost twenty years ago. I vividly remember getting frustrated with evangelical friends of mine who loved debating the Bible and theology but who were not regularly attending any church or studying Scripture. But in another sense, I recognize now that such advice is incoherent and based on flawed premises.
Perdomo hints at one of these premises in his exhortation to Protestants to read the Bible to determine which theologians or scholars are right. Such advice presumes the Protestant doctrine of perspicuity, which, though it has a variety of definitions over more than five hundred years of Protestant history, is typically articulated as meaning that the Bible is sufficiently clear that the self-identifying Christian, regardless of intellectual acuity or academic training, should be able to read it and determine what is necessary for salvation or the essentials of the Christian faith. To presume this doctrine is necessarily to define myself as the final interpretive authority of Scripture—whatever theologian or scholar I read, that source is evaluated according to my interpretation of the Bible. Moreover, such a presumption undermines the ability even to engage in open-minded research and charitable ecumenical dialogue, because any position at odds with what is the so-called clear teaching of Scripture would necessarily be disregarded as de facto erroneous.
Let me provide an example of what this incoherence looks like in practice. Imagine yourself as a self-identifying Protestant who wants to better understand debate among Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox. You hold (perhaps inchoately) to some variation of sola fide, as do many Protestants across a variety of Reformation-originating traditions, and you do so because you’ve been taught, and perhaps you’ve even yourself determined, that it’s what the Bible plainly teaches. (By extension, this implicitly means you presume perspicuity, too).
So you begin reading the Church Fathers and prominent theologians and scholars across various Christian traditions, and some of what you encounter seems to contradict sola fide.
What should you do with such data? One option would be simply to disregard such positions out of hand. After all sola fide is clearly taught in the Bible! That would certainly be consistent with the doctrine of perspicuity, which since the earliest days of the Reformation has operated in close correlation with sola fide. Yet that option would also be contrary to the entire enterprise of rational discourse, in which we allow our opinions and beliefs to be challenged and welcome the possibility that we are actually wrong. It would be to effectively declare, “I refuse to have my opinions on the Bible’s meaning regarding salvation questioned, because I consider them indisputable!”
Another option would be to entertain the possibility of alternative interpretations of Scripture as equally possible. Perhaps the Bible doesn’t clearly teach sola fide, but it does teach something else, such as the historic Catholic position often understood as “faith and works,” or “faith working through love,” to use St. Paul’s expression (Gal. 5:6). But even to entertain that possibility would be to vitiate perspicuity—after all, the Bible is supposed to be clear on this. It’s not up for debate!
I hope you can perceive the dilemma here. The Protestant can resolutely hold to perspicuity in the face of contrary arguments, effectively treating the doctrine as a philosophical first principle, such as the law of non-contradiction or that the whole is greater than its parts. Such first principles cannot be proved; they simply are. Or he can consider the possibility that sola fide is wrong, but that would necessitate abandoning the perspicuity thesis, because he would have to grant that other interpretive positions on salvation have sufficient merit to be evaluated as possibly true—and so the historic Protestant doctrine would thus not be perspicuous. And if Scripture isn’t clear on salvation, dialogue and debate are required, as well as some means of authoritatively resolving those disputes (assuming we want them resolved).
What I’m getting at is that even to engage in the kind of open-minded study and debate that Perdomo calls for is to jettison the doctrine of perspicuity, because the doctrine itself is an obstacle to that enterprise. Perdomo (rightly and to his credit) wants to move beyond the caricatures, over-simplification, and even illogic that define so much of modern religious debate. The question is whether his own Protestant premises enable Protestant apologists to be up to the task.