The most basic argument against Protestantism

Dave Armstrong at Patheos Catholic has pointed out that early Protestants "detested divisions" and were very concerned to maintain unity.

He's right. The most basic argument against Protestantism, which does not require any particular theological premises about authority, is

1. The Protestants expected and claimed that all Christians of good will ("endowed with the Spirit" as my dissertation subject Martin Bucer would put it) would be able to see that their interpretation of Scripture was correct, and that by unleashing Scripture a renewed and reunified Church would emerge. (It's important to bear in mind that early sixteenth-century Christians saw the Church as divided and fractious, and were looking for _greater_ unity, not less).

2. This didn't happen.

3. Therefore, by the standards of the early Reformers themselves, Protestantism is a failure.

Instead of admitting this, Protestants have spent 500 years arguing either that [visible] unity really doesn't matter or that it will happen if we only get one more bit of light out of Scripture or throw off one more unbiblical tradition.

Of course this is painting with a huge brush. Many Protestants do recognize this. But as a whole, Protestantism tends to take the Reformers as a model either substantively (by trying to follow their doctrines) or methodologically ("ecclesia semper reformanda"/"God hath yet more light to break forth out of His Holy Word") or both. And both of these approaches have proven disastrous.

Canon and authority--a common Catholic argument analyzed

One of the strongest Catholic arguments against Protestantism is the challenge, "how do you explain the canon of the New Testament on sola scriptura principles?" At the same time, Catholics often throw away their advantage by silly overstatement. It is nonsense to say, for instance, that "there was no Bible for 300 years," and it is not self-evident that the Church that canonized the Bible was simply identical to the contemporary "Roman Catholic Church," or that accepting the canon automatically means accepting the Catholic understanding of church authority as a whole. As in so many similar debates, I think that the correct position, and the early Church's position (which is generally, broadly speaking, the same thing), transcends both Protestant and Catholic views, although the Catholic view, properly nuanced, is basically correct. The legitimate Protestant criticisms of the way Catholics often present their case are: 1. Scripture is defined in formal rather than material terms--as a canon rather than as particular content. That's how you get what sound to Protestant like crazy statements such as "there was no Bible until the fourth century." This means "there was no fully defined, universally accepted, precise canon until the fourth century." (I'd go further and say, "until the sixteenth," if you really want to define it that precisely.) But to many Protestants it seems pretty silly to use the term "Bible" to mean "a fully defined, precise canon." "The Bible" is a name for the material that the Church has recognized to be divinely inspired. Clearly such material existed long before the fourth century. 2. This brings us to the most common complaint, which is that Catholics confuse the recognition of Scripture with the creation of Scripture. The Church acknowledges that God has inspired certain books. The Church does not make them inspired, and thus to many Protestants it seems blasphemous to say such things as "the Church created Scripture." The common Catholic usage here follows on the first point. If "Scripture" means "a list" rather than divinely inspired content, then it makes sense to say that the Church created the list. But again, to many Protestants that seems to miss the point pretty badly and focus on formalities rather than Spirit-inspired content. 3. And finally, there's the question of what we mean by "the Church" when we speak of the Church determining the canon. That's really the fundamental question between Catholics and Protestants, I think. And again, I think the answer is both/and rather than either/or. Protestants are right that the Church is the body of believers, not just the hierarchy. But many of them see no point in a hierarchy at all, and they are wrong. The Church, properly ordered, is led by bishops in apostolic succession in communion with the Bishop of Rome. And obviously the early Church, which discerned that certain books were inspired by God, was so ordered. However, Catholics spoil their excellent case when they insist on the hierarchical nature of the canon-recognition process. The evidence indicates that this process was mostly a matter of reception by particular communities of believers and then a lengthy process of sorting out the differences between various local canonical traditions. Of course bishops, including Rome, played a key role. But Catholics often speak of the process as if all the bishops got together and issued a decree one day, and that's not how it happened. Now for the major Protestant alternatives, which I think are untenable:

1. Protestants often argue that Scripture is "self-authenticating." This builds on legitimate point 2, of course--the Holy Spirit both inspires Scripture in the first place and witnesses that it is inspired. But clearly this witness speaks to the Church as a whole and not to individuals in isolation. Not recognizing this is perhaps the greatest error of garden-variety American Protestantism. Fortunately, many folks are recognizing this error and moving to a healthier understanding of how Christians hear the Spirit--in community with each other. That being said, I find that many Protestants use the term "self-authenticating" as a magic formula to avoid thinking about the canonical process at all. If you challenge it, you are challenging Scripture somehow. I have trouble explaining this attitude so as to make sense of it, because I don't think it does make sense.

2. Many other Protestants (or sometimes the same Protestants) argue in a more rationalistic fashion that the early Church used certain objective criteria in determining canonicity, such as apostolic authorship. This website is a pretty standard example of that approach. Now obviously there were criteria that the early Church used, but the formal lists one finds on Protestant apologetics websites make the process seem much more cut and dried than it really was. Furthermore, modern scholarship frequently disagrees with the early Church's decision. For instance, the vast majority of scholars think that Peter did not write 2 Peter. Even pretty conservative scholars like Ben Witherington believe that only part of 2 Peter is authentic. Whether you say "2 Peter is authentic and the scholars are just wrong" or "it doesn't matter whether Peter wrote it, because it's inspired by Scripture anyway," clearly some factor is at work other than an objective determination of whether the evidence indicates that Peter wrote it. 
3. A final common objection is that the "early Church" isn't the same thing as the "Roman Catholic Church." This is perhaps particularly common among Anglicans and others less likely to go with the first two approaches. For many moderate Protestants, the judgments of the Church as a whole are to be taken very seriously, while the modern "Roman Catholic Church" is seen as just one among many fragments of the Church. This is the perspective with which I'm most in sympathy, but as Newman showed, it's very naive insofar as it doesn't acknowledge that the early "Catholic Church" was itself one among many contenders. The canon was forged in controversies with Marcionites and Gnostics who had their own rival canons. It wasn't just "the list of books that everyone agreed on."

So to boil the matter down, I think that the attempts of many Protestants to evade the question of Church authority are in vain. Rather, there are two questions that need to be answered on both sides:

a. How is the early Church related to the Church today? Are all Trinitarian Christians its heirs, or just those in communion with Rome, or some other subset of Trinitarian Christianity?

b. Why do we treat the canonical decisions of the early Church differently than other decisions the early Church made?

Note that both of these questions need to be answered by both sides. Catholics can't just assume a simple identity of the Roman Communion with the early Catholic Church. Nor can they simply argue "we should accept everything the early Church accepted," because there were beliefs and practices of the early Church that Catholics don't accept today (like the very harsh attitude to Jews or some of the cultural beliefs about women). But Catholics do have coherent and reasonable answers to these questions.

If Protestants are to have a reasonable answer, it would go (in my opinion) along these lines:

a. All Trinitarian Christians are heirs of the early Catholic Church, not because the early Church was "just everybody" but because the formative doctrinal choices of the early Church were of particular importance and have proved consistently over the centuries to be the right ones. The differences between early Catholics and Marcionites or Arians are fundamental to our identity as Christians in a way that Catholic-Protestant differences aren't. And this is clearly recognized by the Catholic Church today, since "Rome" acknowledges Trinitarian Protestants as baptized brothers and sisters and makes a sharp distinction between them and such groups as the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses.

b. These fundamentally constitutive acts of the early Church include (but are not limited to) the recognition of the core books of the canon. From this perspective, some disagreement about canon is possible where the early Church disagreed. The only point where that disagreement is still alive today is with regard to the "deuterocanonical" books of the OT. For moderate, ecumenical Protestants (such as Anglicans) the question of whether these books are fully canonical is not terribly important. They clearly should be used and treated with honor, but there are some good reasons to question whether they are fully inspired in the way that the books of the Hebrew canon and the NT canon are.


For this argument to work, it needs to be nuanced, I think, by a recognition of the importance of Rome within the broader Church. I am convinced that the bishops of Rome do have a divinely ordained role to play in safeguarding orthodoxy. I am not convinced that everything they condemn is to be condemned, but I am convinced that they have never accepted into the canonical heritage of the Church (I'm using this phrase to mean more than just books, but also defined doctrines, liturgical practices, etc.) something that is fundamentally incompatible with it. This is the main place where I differ from most Anglicans and other ecumenical Protestants, who generally see Catholicism simply as "the biggest denomination"--an important ecumenical partner because of its size and its links with tradition, but not qualitatively different from other Christian bodies. That's why I keep trying to convert personally, but my conviction that all Trinitarian Christians are members of the Church keeps pulling me back.

A flawed argument against contraception

This post arises from a discussion I've been having online with Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong. It began when Dave cited a passage from Calvin condemning contraception on the ground that it is a form of pre-emptive murder. As an offshoot of that discussion, Dave has posted a succinct statement of the "murder analogy" argument against contraception. The core argument goes as follows:

A) Contraception is a deliberate act of preventing the conception of Person X who would have been conceived had the persons been open to new life.

B ) Therefore, the goal or intention is to obliterate the (earthly) existence of Person X.

C) That is also the goal of a murder: to obliterate the (earthly) existence of Person X.

D) Therefore, in the deepest sense, contraception and murder are alike, and evil.

E) Contraception, however, takes it a step further and disallows even the *beginning* of Person X who might have been / would have been conceived, BUT for contraception.

F) Thus, it not only obliterates the earthly existence of Person X, but any existence whatsoever of the Person, in terms of having an eternal soul.

G) In that sense, contraception is even more anti-life than murder is.

H) Therefore, in a qualified, specific sense, contraception can almost be said to be as heinous and wicked as (and philosophically equal to) murder.

This argument doesn't work, because you can't commit a crime against a nonexistent entity. A hypothetical person who would have been conceived under some counterfactual circumstances or other is a nonsensical construct. I can prevent a particular sperm from making contact with a particular egg. But hypothetical people aren't people. I have no moral duties toward them whatsoever. Murder is wrong because it involves malice toward an existing person.

Step F makes the logical problems in the argument even more evident. You can't "obliterate" the existence of that which does not exist.

Furthermore, as someone pointed out when Dave originally posted this argument on his Facebook page, the argument proves too much, because a married couple who choose to go for a walk instead of having sex are also committing "murder" by this logic. If preventing the existence of "Person X" is akin to murder, then whether one does so by abstaining from sex or by engaging in non-procreative sex is irrelevant to the nature of the crime against Person X. You can't import other (much more solid) objections against contraception into _this_ argument, if the argument is to stand on its own two feet. Certainly _if_ non-procreative sex is wrong on other grounds _and_ preventing a person’s existence is wrong, then committing both sins together would be worse than committing only one of them. But if preventing a person’s existence is a crime against them, then it’s a crime no matter how innocent the thing-you’re-doing-instead-of-procreating would otherwise have been.

I can see two ways in which the argument might have some merit, logically:

1. If one could “mess with time” either through time-travel or foreknowledge. So, for instance, if you go back in time to prevent someone who does exist from being conceived, then you are motivated by malice against a specific person whom you know in your present. Of course, we don’t know if this is even possible. Perhaps prophecy could be seen as another example of “messing with time.” So when Merlin in That Hideous Strength tells Jane that she has failed to conceive a child who would have delivered Logres, that makes a certain amount of sense (though it may involve Molinist “middle knowledge,” which is a philosophically controversial concept), because Merlin is capable of prophecy. Even then, though, it makes no sense to say that she did so deliberately, since she did it before she heard the prophecy. Once she heard the prophecy, she could have intentions toward “the child prophesied.” I’m still not sure that it would make sense to say that she committed a crime against said child, though. Her crime, on Merlin’s premises, was rather against Logres.

2. More solidly, the “preformationist” theory to which Calvin and many other premoderns adhered allows you to talk about crimes against future people. If the "seed" is an incipient person or "potential person" then it makes sense to speak of preventing it from fulfilling its potential. Whether that's actually a crime against the future person is  a difficult philosophical issue, I think, but a case could be made that it is. And that's what I take Calvin to be arguing. Dave responded to my initial objections to the use he was making of the Calvin passage by saying that I was "failing to see the forest for the trees." On the contrary, I'm pointing out that the trees in this particular forest won't make the kind of lumber Dave needs. Without preformationism (or time travel) the “quasi-murder” argument fails utterly, because there’s no one to commit a crime against.