Letter to Danijela on Protestants
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:date: 2023-06-18T19:19:00
:category: faith
:tags: church, catholic, protestant, priesthood,
Dear Danijela and Miljenko,
you have asked me during the John’s birthday dinner about the
difference between Catholicism and Protestantism and I have
apparently completely misunderstood your question and bored you
with my lecture on the history of the Czech protestantism. I am
sorry about that. Let me remedy this misunderstanding by writing
this blog-post/letter.
First of all, and most important is what we are not different in.
We all believe in the same God, Creator of the Heaven and Earth,
and all that good stuff agreed upon by the first ecumenical
councils while they were still ecumenical (i.e., including or at
least attempting to include all Christians, Greek or Latin).
Existence of God, triune nature of God, Lord Jesus Christ as both
fully God and fully Man, and all that good stuff. While most
protestant churches are unfortunately rather lax in reciting the
Credo during their Sunday services, and if they do it is usually
`Apostles’ Creed`_, we completely believe in the older
`Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed`_ (the one recited during the
Catholic mass) and other ones from that era (`Athanasian Creed`_
and `Chalcedonian Definition`_).
There are plenty of issues were the popular opinion believes
there is a huge gap between Catholics and Protestants, but it is
not: for example, although whole Reformation started (among other
things) with the discussion about Grace and Salvation, after
couple of centuries even the joint commission of Catholics and
Lutherans (and other Protestant groups later signed upon it as
well) was able to agree on “`Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of
Justification`_” (1999), where they agreed that difference in the
most fundamental issues about salvation (and that we all need
one) are more about stresses and importance we put on various
things, rather than in the thing itself.
There is unfortunately often a difference between what is the
official position of each church and what one can hear in the
local parish on Sunday during the sermon (and I heard from my
Catholic friends, how often they have hard time to listen during
the sermon to what they believe is pure heresy).
There is also even more unfortunate tendency starting with the
Reformation/Counter-Reformation struggles of the sixteenth
century to emphasize differences which are not that crucial. It
is the same as with any other conflict: I can see it in divorcing
couples how something which was completely silly before is
suddenly absolutely fundamental (all the way to proverbial way
how to push toothpaste from a tube or toilet paper roll
orientation) and “How can I live with him/her when he/she does
THIS?” In the same manner many things which were all the way
until the Reformation matter of open (and yes sometimes rather
passionate) discussion like what to think about the
deuterocanonical/apocryphal books of the Bible, relation between
the Scripture and tradition, attitude towards the Virgin Mary, or
the Sacrament of Confession, solidified and changed into crucial
tests whether you are one of US or one of THEM, a friend or
a foe. Both sides in these (and many other) issues shifted
towards the extremes and when anybody suggests that things are
not that simple, he is immediately branded as a heretic, one of
Them, or at least not serious enough about their faith.
Do I say that there is no difference whatsoever and that all
conflicts are just matters of misunderstanding? Actually, no,
I do believe that there are differences. Yes, differences a way
less important than those big questions of salvation, nature of
God etc., but with no less (or perhaps even more) impact on our
everyday life.
I would like to talk now about two things:
* what’s called by Protestants ”The Universal Priesthood of All
Believers”, and
* (related) nature of the Church
I would use a picture of what I believe under the first point.
I am from Czechia and large part of our architecture and even
landscape was re-created after almost total destruction of the
seventeenth century in the Baroque style. I haven’t seen many
Baroque churches here in Dalmatia, but just next to the place
where our churches meets for their Sunday services stands `St.
Nicholas Church`_, often considered `one of the best
Baroque-style buildings north of Alps`_.
Architect of the church made it to impress and to present to its
visitors whole infinite breadth and depth of God and Faith.
Baroque style and for example Baroque polyphonic music (think
Johan Sebastian Bach) are an incredibly complicated and
widely-spread to huge number of streams. That is how I often see
Catholic faith. Incredibly wide tree of branches carrying many
aspects of God’s revelation and Faith. There is whole area of the
Catholic Art and many people spent their whole life discovering
just that, there are Catholic charitable workers and social
activists, who spend their whole life investigating this
dimension of the faith, there are many others. And it is like
when you are present in St. Nicholas church or listening to Bach:
the whole thing is beyond impressive and awe inspiring, but
sometimes one has to work really hard to hear *the cantus firmus*
(the main musical theme of the polyphonic music), sometimes I am
afraid that some people lost view of the forest for the
individual trees, and it is easy to get lost in all those
subparts of the Faith.
Protestant faith is for me like Bauhaus or modern song. It is an
effort to make things as simple as possible and yet complete.
Just one line is enough, if it is the right line, and it is that
effort to find that one line which makes modern art and
Protestant faith interesting. Jokingly, it is that discussion
between Dutch bear drinker (they have hundreds if not thousands
of different types of beer) and the Czech one: “We don’t need
hundreds of types of beer, when we have the right one.” Yes,
there are Protestant artists (actually, not that many of them at
least in the older times), of course there are Protestant social
workers and political activists (you mentioned Martin Luther King
Jr. yourself and there are many others, for example I like
William Wilberforce, who was the leading abolitionist working
towards ending slavery in the British Empire and consequently
worldwide). But for all of them the Protestant message was always
clear: yes, these are awesome things and the world around us
should recognize Christians by their love (John 13:35), then
exactly these acts of love are probably the best tools of
evangelization and turning world’s attention to Christ. However,
it should never be more important than the basic relationship
between individual Christian and His God, about the Salvation and
God’s work on the Earth. *Cantus firmus* should never be silenced
or lost in the cacophony of other sounds.
And exactly this stress on the Christian’s relationship with God
lead Martin Luther (the original one) to discovery that “there is
only one Mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ“
(1. Timothy 2:5) “Mediator” is roughly the same as “priest”,
somebody who stands between God and men, who prays and pleads
with God on their behalf, and in the other direction, who
presents and reflects God’s love to the world. There is no
division of labour between some kind of professional Christians
(i.e., priests) and just observing lay people. We all are called
to be priests in our ways of life (1. Peter 2:9), somebody inside
of the church, more of us in our daily way of life. As Luther
said it, a good shoemaker making good shoes which make people
comfortable and thankful glorifies God more than a lazy priest
who does a sloppy job in celebrating Eucharist. The whole
division between sacred and profane, between Sunday Christianity
and workday paganism should be abolished. Firefighter (of
course!) or a mother taking care of her children are no less holy
and no less servants of God than a priest on Sunday. Yes, Sunday
services, God’s worship, and all that is important, but not
fundamentally different from so-called laymen everyday work. We
all are called to be priests, teachers, prophets and judges: most
of us just for our family and friends (teaching our kids,
resolving conflicts in the family or among our friends, for
example), and only some of us get special training and education
for it, and they do it full time and they are pastors of our
congregations, but there is no fundamental difference between the
one of who studied to be a pastor and the one who trained to be
a shoemaker.
And even concerning the Sunday services, our roles may be widely
different from the Catholic experience. Although in most
Protestant denominations the role of a preacher during the
service is somehow similar to the role of a priest in the
Catholic Mass, it doesn’t have to be so. Notice that in
1. Corinthians implies multiple “actors” during the service: one
preaches the word, one has a prophecy from the Holy Spirit, etc.
In John’s congregation not only anybody from believers can preach
if invited by the elders of the church (e.g., I preached multiple
times), but for example The Lord Supper (the Protestant name for
the Eucharist) is served by lay members of the congregation.
This attitude of equality in front of the God is probably also
a foundation of the persuasion that “all men were created equal”
of the American Declaration of Independence. We all, Protestants,
Catholics, or even non-believers, have this notion of equality
(and related ideas of democracy and republicanism) so deeply
ingrained in all our current thinking, that we cannot imagine
that the world used to believe otherwise and that the division
into farmers, nobility, and priesthood is natural, unchangeable,
and inevitable.
Also, many scholars (theologians, historians, sociologists,
economists) believe that this sanctification of everyday work
(and relative de-emphasizing importance of priests and monks) is
true beginning of the Modern Age and the end of the Middle Ages.
Celebrating of professionalism, profane work lead according to
these scholars to explosion of science, industry and all that
which lead later to Enlightenment, modern industry, science and
medicine.
The second topic I would like to think about is **nature of the
Church**. While the previous topic of the universal priesthood of
all believers is so incredibly prevalent in all our society, that
we don’t see it much anymore, because we have hard time to
understand how anybody could think different, even just
Protestant understanding of the Church is much more complicated
and less homogeneous.
Understanding of the idea of the Church lays in my opinion on the
wide scale of spectrum. On the hand is something I would call
“Church as an organization” and Catholic concept of the Church
(Orthodox are probably even more extreme, but I don’t know enough
about them to make some judgements) is pretty close to it, but it
is by far not the only understanding of the Church.
On the other hand of the spectrum is for example Luther’s idea of
the Church as an event. Church is in his understanding primarily
not an organization with its internal structure, its head, but
the Church happens. Whenever believers congregate to hear the
God’s Word preached there is the Church. And all those buildings
are there only so that it doesn’t rain on them, and all those
organizations around are just to enable those events. And of
course, again, in the spirit of sanctification of profane, such
meetings are not only the Sunday services, but also at least to
some extent “whenever two or three meet in [Jesus] name”.
Unfortunately, this Luther’s radical idea was lately mostly
abandoned by Calvin and most other Protestant thinkers, but the
general notion that the organization is just to make Church
possible is rather prevalent. When the organization is not in the
middle of our thinking about the church, many things could be
different. Suddenly it is not that important how that enabling
organization is structured, and all discussions about
episcopalian, presbyterian, congregational, and other forms of
the organization, are interesting, but centred only on the
pragmatic discussion how well these forms of organization serve
the Church. Truth to be told, there is really only a little
written about the structure of the Church in the New Testament,
and episcopal organization which later (late second and early
third century) developed for pragmatic reasons in the struggle
against various heretic movements and which mostly applied the
organizational principles of the Roman Empire on the Church (for
example the term “diocese” is not originally religious, but these
were kind of regional units of the Roman government and the
Church used the regional state structure as a template for its
own organization). Role of bishops, deacons, presbyters, and
other positions in the Church was changing during the first
centuries of the life of the Church, and the whole organizational
structured finally settled only in the fourth century.
This all would be just an innocent theoretical discussion, and it
mostly is right now in the Protestant world (of course that in
the past there were wars lead about all these details, because
people used anything as an excuse for waging a war against their
neighbour), if not for the Catholics (and Orthodox, but their
attitude towards ecumenism is generally completely negative, so
there is a little hope of deeper relationship there). Something
which was (and should stay to be) just a minor organizational
issue was almost deified and now we can read such weird things as
that the Church is the one only as much it follows the Roman
bishop (Declaration “Dominus Iesus”, 2000, chapter 17). And the
main result of this almost-deification of the Church and the
Roman bishop is used to inflict a deep division in the Body of
Christ, and one can hear endless crowd of Catholic speakers
talking about ecumenism in the one breath with interreligious
dialogue, without regards (or perhaps intentionally) how it is
deeply offensive to all non-Catholics, because it puts us on the
same level with non-Christians.
And of course this sectarian division is then used to exclude all
non-Catholics from participation
.. _`Apostles’ Creed`:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles%27_Creed
.. _`Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed`:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed#Niceno-Constantinopolitan_Creed
.. _`Chalcedonian Definition`:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcedonian_Definition
.. _`Athanasian Creed`:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasian_Creed
.. _`Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification`:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Declaration_on_the_Doctrine_of_Justification
.. _`St. Nicholas Church`:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Nicholas_Church_(Mal%C3%A1_Strana)
.. _`one of the best Baroque-style buildings north of Alps`:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:St._Nikolaus_auf_der_Kleinseite_Innenraum_1.jpg
