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The failure of Protestantism

By Peter Sellick - posted Friday, 7 December 2007


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.

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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.

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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.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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