The failure of Protestantism

Let me propose an outrageous suggestion. The 16th century Reformers of the church had good cause to protest against a church that was drunk on power and greed and which had largely reduced the faith to economics and political manipulation. While they did not mean to create a parallel church called Protestant this was how history panned out for reasons too numerous to mention here. The church in the West has since been fragmented into many denominations which has weakened its voice in the world and which is a falling away from Jesus’ promise “that you may be one”.

After 480 years or so the Protestant experiment has run out of steam and its reason for being has largely evaporated due to the reform of the Roman church. There is now a large consensus among professional theologians both Protestant and Catholic about the centre of the faith and this consensus is growing.

The question is: why do Protestants remain separated after most of the reasons for their separation have disappeared?

I was stimulated to write this article after reading a sermon by Stanley Hauerwas (yes, him again!) on Reformation Sunday. He admits that he does not like this fixture on the Protestant calendar because it tends to celebrate a dark event in the history of the Church, the schism in which we stand today.

While Protestants celebrate the things gained in the Reformation, often things that the Roman Church has also now caught up with, there is little mention of the things we have lost. The first is obvious, it is the unity promised by the Lord. Hauerwas expands:

I often point out that at least Catholics have the magisterial office of the Bishop of Rome to remind them that disunity is a sin. You should not overlook the significance that in several important documents of late, John Paul II has confessed the Catholic sin for the Reformation. Where are the Protestants capable of doing likewise? We Protestants feel no sin for the disunity of the Reformation. We would not know how to confess our sin for the continuing disunity of the Reformation. We would not know how to do that because we have no experience of unity.

Once the break with Rome had occurred the Protestant church found itself prey to the philosophical movements of modernity initiated by the philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes and Locke that undermined all received authority and produced the man who was his own orthodoxy.

This was the final blow to the unity of the Church because it gave philosophical warrant to the individual who was now expected to “make up his own mind”. While the Roman Church can be seen to hold out against this aspect of modernity, Protestants embraced it. Being Church no longer meant belonging to an alternative community but believing in the right things, as long as they were rational, in private.

John Henry Newman recognised that the problem with Anglicanism was rationalism. That is, faith was tried at the court of a particular kind of rationalism associated with natural science. Theology had always been rational on its own terms otherwise it could not have been any sort of discourse. Rationality has as many different forms as there are human activities, the danger is that one kind of rationality is prioritised over all others, the positivist rationality of empiricism.

From the point of view of positivist rationality the Roman church looks irrational, superstitious and backward. The fact that the Roman church holds together a vast range of Christians from South American peasants to sophisticated European and American believers, from the Irish to the Italian, from Franciscan to Dominican makes it difficult for us to image what it is like to be a Catholic. The Protestant imagination has an investment in imagining the worst if only to justify being apart.

If we believe that the Reformation, or rather the schism that it produced, was a tragedy for the church that continues in our time, then we must have very good reasons to remain Protestant. We are now far from Elizabethan England in which the Roman Church was a threat to political order and the smell of the burnings initiated by Queen Mary was still in our nostrils.

Both Protestant and Roman Churches have come a long way, particularly after Vatican II for the Roman. Many of the Protestant prejudices against Rome are no longer valid. One of the greatest fears Protestants have of the Roman Church is that it insists on interfering with our private lives, particularly in what happens in our beds. We Protestants have long since decided that what we do in private is our own business and no business of the Church. This is the attitude that left these Churches speechless in the face of the sexual revolution whose bitter fruits we now taste.

We believe that there is a limit to faith that leaves most aspects of our lives as they are. There is certainly no dying to the self to be raised in Christ.

One of the weaknesses of the Protestant Churches is that they are devoid of a teaching office whose role is to guide the people in the ways of faith. While we may protest that Rome has a tendency to micromanage the lives of its people, particularly with the use of tenuous arguments from natural theology, it is apparent that any church should have a strong teaching office that instructs the people in what it means to be Christian.

Readers may correct me but it seems that this absence in Protestant churches was produced by a reaction to the unfaithful way the Roman Church used its power in the 16th century and the reformers emphasis on grace over the law. The severely reduced teaching office of Protestant Churches means that clergy cannot be leaders but only cheerleaders. Liberalism, that slippery product of modernity, ensures that no definite stand may be taken about anything. This means that Rome often looks legalistic and often it is, unreasonably so. If the sin of Protestantism is that it cannot say anything, the sin of Rome is that it says too much.

The fragmentation of Protestant denominations has produced a spiritual marketplace in which churches compete for believers and in which believers may choose which suits them best. The balance has thus swung from God addressing us to ourselves choosing which denomination best satisfies our needs. Because self assertion is the essence of Enlightenment thinking we experience no anomaly in this.

Not only does this situation throw the emphasis onto the believer it also distorts the life of the church that now looks to its own survival. The Holy Spirit is replaced by the techniques of the church growth movement and those nauseating signs that we find in the front of Protestant churches. The capitulation to modernism has become the capitulation to market forces and the biblical notion that the church is a charismatic body is obscured.

One of the barriers to Protestants going over to Rome is the idea that Rome requires unthinking obedience. But the Church is not fused with Christ, although the Roman Church has often behaved as if it were. The individual believer also stands before his Lord. This is a relationship that cannot be completely taken over by the Church.

In other words the Church may be the body of Christ in the world, but its faithlessness will always mean that it is incomplete, as its history demonstrates. This is not to say that the relationship between the believer and his Lord is in any way complete but that the believer must listen to the voice of the Church in the council of his own conscience.

It is interesting that recent Papal encyclicals now argue their case. This means that blind obedience is not the model for belief but that we are expected to understand what we believe and why.

While the sin of Protestants is to reduce the status of the church in favour of the individual, the sin of Rome has been to ignore its incompleteness in being the body of Christ and tend towards totalitarianism. Both of these movements are disastrous for the church, the one producing faith only on our terms and the other suffocating the individual spiritual journey.

But what should determine our allegiance now that the cat of schism is out of the bag? Is the unity that Rome represents a determining factor? Is it time for Protestants to return to the arms of mother Church? What exactly is it that is holding us back and are the reasons we hold back still valid?

Whatever we decide, it is obvious that long after Protestantism has been swept from the face of the earth, the Roman church will stand. Although faithfulness is not necessarily linked with success (witness the mega churches) it is significant that with all of the concessions to modernism Protestant churches continue to decline. One is tempted to draw the conclusion that the concessions are the problem and they have produced a church that is indistinguishable from the rest of society and thus irrelevant.

It is clear that the ecumenical movement has largely failed and that the unification of the Church from the top down will not happen in the foreseeable future. But that does not mean that unification cannot happen from below as believers seek a more complete expression of the faith. Why should believers wait for the hierarchy to make a move?

It is significant how well the leaders of the churches have settled down to the present arrangement. If a Catholic Archbishop were to launch a program inviting Protestants to explore the Roman church, or the other way around, there would be accusations of sheep stealing. Apparently, peaceful separation is preferable to any attempt at unification that may cause hurt. This is of course in the spirit of the age that values toleration over honest debate. But one would wish that meetings of the heads of Churches were a more robust affair instead of supporting the pretence that everything is well in our separated state.

Both the Anglican and the Uniting Church in Australia declare that they are part of the “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” and that they cling to the early creeds of the Church. In other words they are not separated from Rome by heresy, they are separated by the continuing influence of historical events and by church culture. To be so determined is an abnegation of the freedom of the gospel which orders culture aright under the Lordship of Christ.

Protestants are caught between the sins of Rome and (in the Anglican case) Canterbury. Perhaps it is time now to consider the unity of the Church from below and for Protestants to push away years of misunderstanding and take a closer look. It may be that they discover a different church than that which they imagined and that consequently the path to union does not seem impossible.