When Catholic intellectuals (such as the historian Brad S. Gregory or sociologist Christian Smith) talk about the problem with the many and varied manifestations of Protestantism, the focus often lands on Protestantism’s tendency toward individualism and subjectivism. After all, according to the premises of every Protestant denomination (following Luther, Calvin, and the rest of the luminaries of the Reformation), the ultimate arbiter of religious truth is the individual, self-defined Christian, who is responsible both for determining what is divine revelation and how it is to be properly interpreted.
But what if the essential problem with Protestantism, rather, has to do with a failure to maintain the proper balance between heaven and earth?
Scholar Matthew Becklo in his new book The Way of Heaven and Earth: From Either/Or to the Catholic Both/And makes precisely this argument. His comparison of Protestant and Catholic conceptions of the connection between heaven and earth is an illuminating way to contemplate ecumenical debate and an interesting means of helping our Protestant brothers and sisters consider the problem of their religious system from a different perspective.
Becklo’s thesis is that at a paradigmatic level, the greatest dilemmas faced today are what he calls “heaven-earth dilemmas,” meaning how we understand heaven and earth and their connection to each other: the people and places of heaven and earth, as well as man’s place and man himself as he relates to this world and the transcendent. Sometimes man chooses a heavenward way that prioritizes the heavenly element at the expense of the earthly; other times, he focuses on the earthward at the expense of the heavenly. The only way to resolve this dilemma, says Becklo, is through Christ, who is “the Way of heaven and earth.”
Indeed, they are in fact false dilemmas, because Christ frees us from choosing exclusively between heaven and earth. Yes, heaven is where we are directed, but earth is where we are placed, and by virtue of the divine stamp upon creation, earth remains good, albeit tainted by the Fall (Gen. 1:31). And the most perfect expression of this careful balance between heaven and earth is found in the Catholic Church, because “it seeks dualities without dualism, binaries without bifurcation, dyads without dichotomy.” When it comes to heaven and earth, the Church does not teach “either/or,” but affirms “both/and.”
This applies to Catholic-Protestant debate in the sense that the errors of Protestant theology as manifested in its most foundational doctrines—sola fide (faith alone), sola gratia (grace alone), solus Christus (Christ alone), sola scriptura (Scripture alone), soli Deo gloria (for the glory of God alone)—reflects that “either/or” mistake by overemphasizing the heavenward. Sola fide and sola gratia, for example, disparage the role of man’s participation in his salvation; solus Christus rejects the mediatory role of the priesthood and the saints; and soli Deo gloria diminishes the doctrine of ancient Patristic teaching of apotheosis, by which man is glorified in and through the grace of Christ.
More practically, one sees the Protestant overemphasis on the heavenward in the Reformers’ tendency to prohibit song and dance at weddings, Carnival revelry before Lent, and even Christmas celebrations. Masses were to be, in Luther’s words, shorn of “vestments, ornaments, hymns, prayers, musical instruments, lamps, and all the pomp of visible things.” Religious orders and monasteries, central to Christian religious experience for many centuries, were dissolved on the grounds that they acted as obstacles between God and the Christian and, more rhetorically, were dens of corruption and sin.
Luther, Calvin, and the other leaders of the Reformation taught that the Holy Spirit—absent a divinely ordained and preserved ecclesial authority—would confirm divine truth to the individual Christian reading his Bible. Though most early Reformers may not have intended it, this emphasis on the spiritual over and against the material led to the splintering of Protestantism into manifold competing ecclesial institutions and theological systems. In many cases, it also led to suspicion if not antagonism toward the corporeal, implicitly (or explicitly) teaching that the body is not really an essential part of the human person.
That said, we can also be honest about the problems that plagued late medieval Catholicism that provoked the Reformation in the first place. Becklo explores the five “alsos”: works, merit, sub-mediators, tradition, and the glory of man. For example, an emphasis on works that undercuts the role of grace is visible in the sale of indulgences and a late medieval scholasticism that obsessed over the esoteric at the expense of the heart of the gospel. The other four were grounded in the first: a distorted emphasis on merit (undermining God’s grace); a prioritization of the sub-mediators of the Church (such as priests and saints) that obscured the centrality of Christ; a focus on Tradition as represented and embodied in papal, episcopal, and clerical leaders that undermined the role of Scripture; and a celebration of the glory of man that was in tension with God’s glory.
Yet as much as these represented a certain type of crisis within late medieval Catholicism, the Council of Trent, which occurred about one generation after the beginning of the Reformation, rejected both the heaven-obsessed way of the solas and the earth-obsessed way of the alsos. Responding to the Protestant charge that the Church had descended into a works-based Pelagianism, Trent declared, “If anyone shall say that man can be justified before God by his own works . . . without divine grace through Christ Jesus: let him be anathema.” Trent’s ninth canon in turn rejected justification by faith alone as also erroneous.
The Church also ended the sale of indulgences in 1567. Though the Church affirmed the centrality and importance of Scripture, it also acknowledged that the Bible had been formally compiled and canonized by the Church, based on Tradition, by the end of the fourth century. And in response to the emphasis on man’s sin, as found in the writings of Luther and Calvin (and the Calvinist teaching of total depravity), the Church teaches that denigrating man does not give God glory. Rather, as St. Irenaeus taught, “the glory of God is man fully alive.”
In sum, whereas Protestantism erred in going too far in the heavenward direction—and in the process vitiated the goodness of man and creation—the Catholic Church via its magisterial teaching authority was able to retain the balance between the heavenward and earthward. The Church, because it is Christ’s, has always been able to affirm the “both/and.” As even some Protestant observers are admitting, their religious system struggles to do so.