I can understand and appreciate why some Protestants might be annoyed at the way that conversions from various Protestant traditions to Catholicism are often covered in Catholic (and even secular) media. There is a certain triumphalistic brand of Catholic apologetics, which especially proliferates on social media, that seems to share the attitude of an SEC football team running up the score against Kent State. In your face, Southern Baptist Convention!
This is not good, as my friend Mike Sabo, a Protestant editor and writer, argues in a recent piece at American Reformer that has attracted even Catholic media attention. Sabo expresses his frustration with Catholics who unfairly caricature and simplify Protestantism, and I wholeheartedly agree and sympathize with that frustration. As someone who was persuaded to leave Presbyterianism for Catholicism fifteen years ago through the evangelistic witness of other former Protestants, I believe that ecumenical debate (and really, all intellectual debate) demands that we engage with the very best arguments our interlocutors can offer.
Yet I think Sabo overreaches in his complaint, largely because he engages in the same kind of rhetoric in his criticism of Catholics and Catholic apologetics. He writes, “Catholics are regularly outraged when Protestants try to convert them, or talk as if they aren’t part of the one true, catholic, holy, and apostolic church. But these pro-Catholic apologists have no problem with proselytizing evangelicals.” What Catholics are we talking about? Sabo offers no examples. And even if some Catholics present a double standard when it comes to Catholic and Protestant debates, so what? Do Catholic claims stand or fall because some Catholics are hypocrites?
Sabo continues: “However, when Protestants, especially in the political arena, question the leading doctrines and dogmas of the Catholic Church, that’s seen as a social faux pas that will likely get you locked out of the upper echelons of the institutional Right.” I presume Sabo has examples to substantiate this claim, one also found in a recent book by prominent Protestant scholars Brad Littlejohn and Chris Castaldo, but he doesn’t give any. It also seems overwrought, given that there are twice as many Protestants in Congress as Catholics, and our president, secretaries of Defense and the Treasury, and speaker of the House are all Protestant.
The most important argument Sabo makes is that a lot of Catholic apologetics fails to address what he calls “historic Protestant positions,” asserting that “this crowd seems to evince almost no familiarity with the confessions, catechisms, or teachings of classic orthodox Protestantism.” The charge, neatly summarized, would be that many Catholic apologists are not being charitable, and they are attacking low-hanging fruit rather than the very best of the Protestant tradition.
For example, Sabo points to the Eucharist as an example of modern Catholic apologetics failing to take into account the robust theological sophistication of some Protestant understandings of the doctrine. “A caricatured modern memorialist approach that even Zwingli would blanch at is simply not representative of classical Protestantism. Which is why converts most often than not aren’t even converting from historic Protestantism, but from a pale shadow of it.” He cites as an example of this “historic Protestantism” eighteenth-century Anglican Daniel Waterland, who taught that people receiving communion could partake of Christ’s sacrifice, just not literally. Indeed, claims Sabo, this understanding was taught by the Church Fathers.
Sabo refers to “historic Protestantism,” “classical Protestantism,” and “classic orthodox Protestantism.” Yet what, exactly is this? When I was myself a Presbyterian seminary student, I would have pointed to whatever consensus could be identified among the prominent Reformers, particularly as manifested in various Protestant confessions of faith: the Augsburg Confession of the Lutherans, the Westminster Confession of Faith of English Presbyterians, and the “Three Forms of Unity” of Dutch Calvinists (the Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dort, and the Heidelberg Catechism). And it’s true that there is a significant amount of theological agreement in these various confessional documents.
Yet this alleged consensus is arbitrary. The so-called “Radical Reformers,” for example, including such persons as Thomas Müntzer, Andreas Karlstadt, and the Zwickau prophets, as well as Anabaptist movements such as the Hutterites and the Mennonites, were contemporaneous with Luther, Bucer, and Melanchthon, but also condemned by them. Early Lutheranism was divided between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists, leaders of the latter being persecuted, imprisoned, and ultimately defeated in the 1560s and ’70s. Calvinists and Arminians in the early seventeenth century divided both on the continent and in England over soteriological issues, promulgating different confessional documents.
Moreover, even those examples Sabo cites as representatives of “historic Protestantism” disagreed over pedobaptism (baptism of infants) or credobaptism (believer’s baptism); the nature of the Eucharist (e.g., symbol, Christ somehow spiritually present, or sacrifice); and church polity (e.g., episcopal, presbyterian, or congregationalist). They disagreed over who is saved, how those people are saved, and if they can lose their salvation. Those disagreements over ensuing generations resulted in new and diverse Protestant ecclesial communities and new confessional documents, and they define Protestantism to this day.
The appeal to anything called “historic” or “classical” Protestantism that demonstrates a certain unity or purity of doctrine fails, because it is necessarily ad hoc. It elides many of those falling within the Protestant ecosystem, whether in 1530 (Augsburg Confession), 1563 (Heidelberg Catechism), or 1647 (Westminster Confession of Faith), because there were many self-identifying Protestants at all those historical moments who were categorically excluded from those very same confessions. It amounts to what my friend and Catholic philosopher Bryan Cross calls shooting an arrow and then drawing a target around it, because the individual Protestant gets to determine what is genuine Protestantism and what is not. By excluding Protestants with whom one disagrees, one can give an impression of unity—but only an impression.
Finally, I appreciate that there are varied and nuanced Protestant opinions on Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist, as different Protestant traditions call it. But speaking as someone who was a member of both non-denominational and Presbyterian churches, the opinion that it is in any sense a sacrifice is not widely held among Protestants today. Thus, for Catholics to critique popular Protestant opinions about this central Christian practice seems entirely appropriate, even if Sabo and some of his Reformed confreres believe such opinions to be less defensible than their own or departing from what many earlier Protestants believed.
Yes, Catholic apologetics should seek to address the many diverse manifestations of Protestant theological opinions, whether on the Eucharist or anything else. Some of those opinions have more historical credibility or logical coherence than others. But the very decentralized nature of Protestantism—something inherent since its sixteenth-century beginnings—makes this an inherent challenge. There is no singular historic, classical Protestantism. There never was.