In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman—esteemed by conservative Protestants and Catholics alike for his brilliant cultural analysis—declared that Texas Democratic politician James Talarico “represents Christianity’s past, not its future.” Trueman argues that Talarico’s brand of Protestantism, which affirms transgenderism and radical feminism, is at odds with biblical, historic Christianity. It is, however, “perfectly in accord with the respectable therapeutic beliefs of a certain segment of the American elite.”
The political relevance of Talarico’s faith was reinforced earlier this month, when the New York Times offered a sympathetic portrayal of the Texas congressman and his relationship with the pastor of his Presbyterian congregation, Jim Rigby. In perhaps the most jarring part of the Times’ feature, Talarico argues that the Annunciation as described in Luke 1:26-38 is actually an affirmation of abortion rights, because Mary says “yes” to God’s request to have her bring the incarnate Son of God into the world. (To the credit of “The Gray Lady,” the article acknowledges that nowhere in this biblical episode does God actually ask Mary—the angel Gabriel tells her she will conceive a son named Jesus, and she assents.)
Rigby, Talarico’s pastor, in turn refuses to use male pronouns for God because it is a type of “violence” against women. His Presbyterian church uses the “Inclusive Bible,” a “feminist translation” that has been in use there since the 1990s. Pastor Rigby also doesn’t use the word “Lord” because of its alleged Eurocentric and patriarchal connotations.
Nevertheless, Talarico, currently on leave from his studies at a Presbyterian seminary in Austin, asserts that his faith is biblical. “I don’t believe in a progressive or conservative Christianity; I believe in a biblical Christianity. . . . My faith is rooted in Scripture and the teachings of Jesus Christ.” Talarico is certainly familiar enough with Scripture to quote and interpret it. He argues, for example, that when St. Paul declares in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither male nor female” in Christ Jesus, this is an affirmation of alternative, non-binary gender identities.
One may, as Trueman does, write off Talarico and Rigby as interpreting Scripture not according to its true context, but through the lens of modern progressive fashions. “Liberal Protestants like Talarico have ended up affirming as good and true whatever polite tastes require and abandoning any aspect of Christian teaching that appears to stand in the way of progress,” Trueman opines. Moreover, the broader liberal theology to which Talarico subscribes, though once prominent in postwar American society, is now peripheral, if now on life support: his denomination currently claims one percent of the adult population of the United States, and only 9 percent of those members are under the age of thirty. Almost half are sixty-five or older.
Yet as much as I admire and appreciate Trueman, his analysis here is insufficient (and wrong). Yes, per Trueman, the earliest Reformers aimed to restore a truly biblical vision of Christianity to sixteenth-century Europe. But even the most die-hard defenders of the Reformation today don’t accept every biblical interpretation of Luther, Calvin, and other early Reformers. Many Protestants today, including some Lutherans, reject Luther’s affirmation of baptismal regeneration in his Small Catechism and Large Catechism. Many Reformed folk blanch at Calvin’s teaching of double predestination—“those whom God passes over, he condemns; and this he does for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines for his own children” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.XXIII.1). The earliest Reformers couldn’t agree with one another, so it should be no surprise that their theological descendants today also often disagree with them (and also with one another).
The fact of the matter is that the Reformers, just like Talarico and Rigby, were seeking to make sense of a sacred text while worshiping untethered from a magisterial ecclesial institution that for fifteen centuries had authoritatively told Christians what to believe about the Bible. The Reformers often appealed to early Church Fathers to defend their exegetical decisions, but they also were more than willing to depart from Patristic teachings when they conflicted with their own biblical interpretations. As any student of Patristics learns, the Church Fathers were not exactly vocal advocates of sola scriptura or sola fide; they also promoted obedience to the bishop of Rome, devotion to Mary, and the Real Presence, among other Catholic teachings.
Trueman and other Protestants with whom he is aligned continue to adhere to various creeds and councils that they share with Catholics (though by no means all). This gives the impression that some Protestants, often of an evangelical or “conservative” variety, are much more proximate to the Catholic Church. In one sense, that’s true—the more a Protestant accepts doctrines that are de fide Catholic teaching, the easier it is for Catholics to engage in ecumenical conversation and efforts with them. But the Protestant roots are still rotten.
As much as Trueman may bristle at this, he and Talarico are more paradigmatically alike than he would want to admit. They both acknowledge the fundamental Protestant premise that the individual self-professing Christian, no longer beholden to a magisterial ecclesial authority, is free to interpret Scripture as his conscience dictates. Trueman, like me and many other Catholics, finds Talarico’s hermeneutics abhorrent. But, untethered from an external institution capable of authoritatively judging those hermeneutics, Trueman possesses no paradigmatic means of censuring them. All he has is his own conscience, which tells him that the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon are better interpreters of Scripture than modern liberal Protestantism, even though, according to Protestants, those councils possessed no authority to bind consciences. This is unstable ground upon which to build a theology or church.
Certainly it’s true that Catholics share more with the theological commitments of Trueman and many other conservative Protestants than we do with the likes of Talarico and Rigby. But Talarico and Rigby are no less Protestant than Trueman. They are ultimately all individual, self-professing Christians articulating and defining doctrines not via recourse to an extrinsic authority, but their own personal interpretation of the Bible, informed by a panoply of ecclesial, theological, and philosophical influences.
Talarico thinks the Bible teaches that God is “non-binary” and affirms abortion; Trueman thinks such propositions absurd. But within the Protestant paradigm, who arbitrates between them to determine which is authentic Protestantism? The answer, as it has been since the beginning of the Reformation, is no one.