What’s the Difference?

In a recent interview evangelical theologian Robert Saucy summarized his view of the primary theological differences between Catholics and Protestants in the following way:

Q. What are the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants? A. They’re the same as they were at the Reformation. There are three significant ones. First is the question of final authority. Protestants hold to sola scriptura [Scripture as their final authority]. For Catholics, the final authority is Scripture as interpreted by the church, that is, the magisterium (the pope and bishops). That’s where Catholicism gets its teachings that can’t be found in Scripture, like veneration of Mary, indulgences and purgatory. Second, Catholics view the church as an extension of Christ’s incarnation. For them, the church is divine as Christ was divine. One result of this is the Catholic proclamation: “Come to the church for salvation, for faith in the church and faith in Christ are one act of faith.” That leads to the third difference: salvation. The Catholic catechism makes it very clear that you are born again and justified through baptism. That means faith plus a certain rite – which is administered by the church – is necessary for salvation. So, the church essentially grants salvation. Although this salvation is “by faith,” additional grace enables us “to work” to attain eternal life. And that’s the problem with saying we speak the same gospel. One of them is clear: Christ did it; we can’t add anything to that. The other one is: Christ did it, but to actually avail yourself of what Christ did you have to do this and this.

Unfortunately, this quote is just one example of the kinds of inaccurate and misleading characterizations of both Catholic and Protestant doctrines that are all too common in evangelical treatments of Catholic beliefs. Sadly, there are important differences that continue to divide Catholics and evangelical Protestants, but Saucy’s quote fails to get to the heart of the matter and winds up distorting both Catholic and Reformation teachings.

Saucy’s first point about sola scriptura accurately defines the doctrine as affirming Scripture as the final authority. One too often hears sola scriptura defined as a belief that Scripture is the only authority for Christians, a distortion that fails to acknowledge the role and authority of tradition in providing an interpretive grid for understanding and passing on the teaching of Scripture.

Nevertheless, what Saucy gives with one hand, he takes away with the other. When he describes the Catholic difference on this point, he distinguishes Catholic doctrine as relying on the interpretation of the church. Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, presumably he believes that Protestants do not rely upon the church in this way. But this formulation denies the rather obvious reality that Protestants do have their own church magisteria, i.e., Protestants have their own traditions of biblical interpretation (many of which they share in common with Catholics from the pre-Reformation era).

The Protestant Reformers were not opposed to tradition; on the contrary, they studied and relied heavily on the work of early and medieval church traditions in developing their critique of certain aspects of the life and doctrine of the western church in the sixteenth century. The Reformation was not a revolutionary break with preceding tradition but rather a reforming movement within the western church, and the magisterial Reformers openly acknowledged the authority of the church in interpreting Scripture and defining church dogma. That was the very point of the numerous Protestant confessions of faith that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The difference between Catholics and Protestants on Scripture and tradition is not that Catholics ascribe an interpretive role and authority to the church while Protestants do not. Rather, the key difference is that Catholics believe that their magisterium can and has taught infallibly (on certain occasions) while Protestants believe that only the Bible is an infallible authority and that all interpretive magisteria and their interpretations are always fallible and to be subordinated in authority to Scripture itself.

Second, Saucy’s description of the relation of Catholic ecclesiology to the incarnation begs for some serious qualification. Saucy seems to assert that Catholics have obliterated the Creator-creature distinction by confessing that the church has become God. What else can he mean when he says that Catholics believe that the church is divine “as Jesus was divine”? (As an aside, why say that Christ was divine? Isn’t he still around?). But the Catholic Church does not believe that the church is divine in the same sense that Jesus is divine. That’s not at all what the Catholic Church means by referring to the church as an extension of the incarnation. Instead, they mean that the church is the people within which Jesus dwells. The church is united to Christ by the Spirit and thus becomes a mediator of Christ’s presence to the world and the means in and through which Jesus operates to accomplish his ongoing mission in the world. Jesus is the Head (in heaven) and the church is his body, the means whereby he accomplishes his will on earth.

This is quite clear in the Catholic Catechism where the use of bride imagery subsumed under the exposition of the church as the body of Christ in order to clarify and explain more precisely the way that the Church is Christ’s body and especially to maintain a distinction between Christ and his church. The Catholic Catechism, paragraph 789, reads:

The comparison of the Church with the body casts light on the intimate bond between Christ and his Church. Not only is she gathered around him; she is united in him, in his body. Three aspects of the Church as the Body of Christ are to be more specifically noted: the unity of all her members with each other as a result of their union with Christ; Christ as head of the Body; and the Church as bride of Christ.

Paragraph 796 continues:

The unity of Christ and the Church, head and members of one Body, also implies the distinction of the two within a personal relationship. This aspect is often expressed by the image of bridegroom and bride. The theme of Christ as Bridegroom of the Church was prepared for by the prophets and announced by John the Baptist. The Lord referred to himself as the “bridegroom.” The Apostle speaks of the whole Church and of each of the faithful, members of his Body, as a bride “betrothed” to Christ the Lord so as to become but one spirit with him. The Church is the spotless bride of the spotless Lamb. “Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her.” He has joined her with himself in an everlasting covenant and never stops caring for her as for his own body: This is the whole Christ, head and body, one formed from many . . . whether the head or members speak, it is Christ who speaks. He speaks in his role as the head (ex persona capitis) and in his role as body (ex persona corporis). What does this mean? “The two will become one flesh. This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church.” And the Lord himself says in the Gospel: “So they are no longer two, but one flesh.” They are, in fact, two different persons, yet they are one in the conjugal union, . . . as head, he calls himself the bridegroom, as body, he calls himself “bride.” (Augustine, En. in Ps. 74:4)

The Catechism summarizes the sense in the Church is the body of Christ as follows in paragraph 807: “The Church is this Body of which Christ is the head: she lives from him, in him, and for him; he lives with her and in her.”

There is nothing here that Protestants must deny (although, of course, Protestants do not affirm that the fullness of the church subsists in the Catholic Church). It could be debated whether describing the church as an “extension of the incarnation” is the best or most helpful way to articulate the substance of the union that exists between Christ and his people. But the Catholic ecclesiology expressly denies that the church is divine in the way that Saucy suggests.

Third, Saucy’s statements about salvation, faith, and the sacraments puts him at odds not only with the Catholic Church but also with most of the major traditions of the Protestant Reformation. Saucy appears to believe that if the church plays any necessary instrumental role as a means in and through which God grants salvation, then the church would control the salvation of her members (the church “grants” salvation). This would also allegedly deny justification sola fide by adding human works to the faith alone that God requires for receiving Christ’s redemption. And he goes even further when he maintains that any human activity performed to “avail yourself of what Christ did” is a perversion of the gospel that compromises the finished work of Christ by adding human works to the equation.

These views have radical implications that are starkly opposed (pace Saucy) to those of the leading Protestant Reformers. Luther, Calvin, and many other Protestants and Protestant confessions affirmed that Catholic doctrines of baptismal efficacy were too weak rather than too strong. Not only did Lutheran and Reformed confessions strongly affirm that baptism was a means of grace through which God offered and conferred a saving union with Christ (which, of course, does not entail that God’s grace was restricted only to the administration of the sacraments), the Reformers also denied the necessity of a sacrament of penance because they believed the saving efficacy of God’s grace in baptism continues for the whole life of the faithful. Thus, the grace of baptism is not lost due to post-baptismal sin and restored via supplementary sacraments. Rather, the efficacy of baptism extends over the entire course of the lives of believers, and they find forgiveness of sins by returning continually to the grace of God in Christ into whom they were baptized.

John Calvin says as much in his 1547 Antidote to the Council of Trent:

We assert that the whole guilt of sin is taken away in baptism, so that the remains of sin still existing are not imputed. That this may be more clear, let my readers call to mind that there is a twofold grace in baptism, for therein both remission of sins and regeneration are offered to us. We teach that full remission is made, but that regeneration is only begun and goes on making progress during the whole of life. Accordingly, sin truly remains in us, and is not instantly in one day extinguished by baptism, but as the guilt is effaced it is null in regard to imputation. Nothing is plainer than this doctrine.

In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin again affirmed:

We are not to think that baptism was conferred upon us only for past time, so that for newly committed sins into which we fall after baptism we must seek new remedies of expiation in some other sacraments…But we must realize that at whatever time we are baptized, we are once for all washed and purged for our whole life (4.15.3).

John Craig’s 1592 Catechism also adds the following:

Q: How long, and by what way doth baptism work in us?A: All the days of our life, through faith and repentance.

Note: for those not familiar with Craig’s catechism, it was approved by the Church of Scotland and one of the primary catechetical tools in the Scottish kirk until the Westminster catechisms were written in the 1640s. See also the Belgic Confession, Article 25, and Francis Turretin’s Institutes 19.19.12-23 for similar teaching.

Saucy’s argument against the necessity of baptism also applies equally to the reading and preaching of Scripture and all acts of evangelism. According to his logic, not only the sacraments but all human activity deemed necessary to “avail yourself of what Christ did” in his saving work on our behalf is a perversion of the gospel of grace. Thus, if he is consistent, Saucy could not insist that hearing and responding to the word of God (written or spoken) plays any necessary role in receiving salvation since this too is human activity. Reading the Bible or listening to sermons would be human “works” that take away from Christ’s completed work of redemption. After all, hearing or reading the Scriptures is doing something to avail oneself of what Christ did.

Furthermore, hearing and/or reading the Bible is something that comes to each of us through the life and ministry of the church, whether in the public reading and preaching in corporate worship, in small group Bible study, in one-on-one discussions, and (not least) through the labors of Christians who translate and distribute the Scriptures by various means. Thus, we receive the word of God through the administration of the church. Is this mediatorial role for the church also a subversion of the gospel? According to the logic of Saucy’s statements above, it is.

To press this reductio one step further, we should also point out that Saucy’s rejection of any human activity or mediation in our reception of salvation actually implies that faith itself is not necessary for salvation. “Availing yourself of what Christ did” is what happens when we personally receive by faith what Christ accomplished on our behalf. But Saucy says that any teaching that requires us to avail ourselves of Christ’s redemptive work by doing certain things is a perversion and denial of the gospel. Since I am sure that Saucy would reject this inference, something here is clearly amiss in his statements above.

There are a couple of major problems here. First, Saucy fails to distinguish between redemption accomplished and redemption applied. Jesus accomplished our redemption by his death and resurrection as our representative. He did for us what we could not do for ourselves, and we cannot do anything to add to his redemptive work (nor must we try, for even in our trying, we would reveal that we misunderstood our helplessness and the all-sufficiency of Jesus’ work).

Nevertheless, the redemption that Jesus accomplished must be applied to each of us individually by the Spirit, and that application of redemption necessarily includes our active response to Christ.Furthermore, the work of the Spirit ordinarily comes to us through the ministry of the church as various members of the people of God minister to us in myriad ways. Christ’s own presence to us. So we do need to do things to “avail ourselves of what Christ did” for us, and ordinarily we cannot do this and be saved apart from our membership and participation in the life and ministry of the church. John Calvin and other Reformers strongly affirmed Cyprian’s dictum that we cannot have God as Father without having the church as our mother.

Second, Saucy has problems with the necessity and instrumental role of the church and the sacraments in our salvation because he thinks of faith as something radically immediate (i.e., unmediated) that is disconnected from any “external” and physical rites or institutions, indeed from any human activity whatsoever. This idea assumes a strange zero-sum logic according to which any human activity competes with and detracts from God’s activity in the reception of God’s saving work.

Therefore, God’s activity must be kept strictly separate from all human activity of any sort in order to preserve the gratuity of salvation. But faith is a human action and response. When we believe, it is we who believe and express or embody that belief in obedience to God. This truth is not negated when we also affirm that faith is a gift of God’s grace. Faith is simultaneously both a gift of God and a human response/activity.

The sacraments are also human activities through which God works to save his people. However, they are not human “works” that human tradition adds to faith and thus destroys the gospel of grace alone. Pitting the sacrament of baptism against the human response of faith confuses the way in which baptism is a means of grace. Sacraments are an objective means of grace, i.e., they are the tangible way in which God gives himself to us. Faith is the subjective means by which we personally receive God as he gives himself to us through the objective means of the sacraments.