Three Epiphanies Concerning Religion – Three
This last epiphany came retroactively, as an illumination of something I had done more than twenty years earlier. The act it illuminated was my decision to become a Catholic, and it crystallized for me an essential difference between the Catholic and Protestant ways of looking at the sources of authority in Christianity.
I suppose it must be ten years or so now since the conversation. My wife and I are friends with a Mennonite couple, who unfortunately have since moved away from this area, and I used to have lunch occasionally with the husband, who is a Mennonite minister. Our conversations often touched on the Catholic-Protestant division. And as we had both come (or come back to) Christianity by winding roads, we sometimes talked about those journeys. In describing his own arrival in the Mennonite church after a certain amount of church-hopping, he put it something like this: “I asked myself which church’s teachings were closest to what I believe, and the answer was the Mennonites.”
“I guess I did it the other way around,” I said. “I asked myself which church had the authority to tell me what to believe.”
I had not thought of it in those terms at the time; it was only as I said these words, years later, that I realized that they were a succinct description of what I had done. During my fairly brief time in the Episcopal Church I had participated in any number of discussions about various Christian teachings. No conclusions were ever reached, at least none having any more solid foundation than “Well, I think…” I had in the back of my mind that somewhere there must be someone or something—some sort of council, perhaps, or a set of writings, which I pictured vaguely as a heavy tome printed on parchment—which could settle these questions.
It had become clear to me that there were a number of people in the Episcopal Church, including many of the clergy, who did not believe much or most of what Christianity had traditionally taught. In a pattern which soon became familiar to me, they treated the faith as a sort of philosophical poem or novel which provided a certain amount of wisdom and insight into the human conditions, but which had nothing much to do with any reality outside the human mind (apart, that is, from progressive politics).
There were others who did believe the traditional teachings; I had become one, and I wanted to know whether the skeptics or the believers spoke authentically for the church as a body. I heard occasional references to “the teaching of the Church,” and assumed that there must be some authority which could settle these arguments. And the moment when I realized that there was no such authority was the moment I began to leave the Episcopal Church.
My friend and I talked about this for a while. It seemed to me, I said, that in Protestantism the individual is the ultimate authority, whereas in Catholicism the individual must, in the end, submit his own judgment to that of the Church on questions of faith and morals. He replied that Catholicism only pushes that individual responsibility back one level, to the act of choosing the authority: in choosing to accept the authority of the Church I was still exercising a choice as to what to believe. And that’s perfectly true. There’s no escape (if anybody is looking for one) from the need to make that personal decision for or against God, for or against Jesus Christ, for or against a particular approach to Christianity as embodied in the various churches.
And it’s also true that Protestantism, at least in its more traditional forms, does in principle recognize an authority beyond the individual, namely the Bible. The difference is that once one accepts the authority of the Church one has agreed to submit in matters where one’s own reasoning might lead to a different conclusion. It could be said that the Protestant is in the same position with respect to the Bible, but the Bible is mute when a dispute arises, and if one finds in it what one wishes to find there is no source of correction. Since there is no authority in Protestantism which can resolve disputes about what the Bible means, there is a natural, continual, and inevitable process of division as people part company with each other when they can’t agree.
The conclusion I came to was that in order for the essential teachings of Christ to remain known over the centuries there must be a living authority; I mean living in flesh and blood, able to consider and adapt to historical changes but yet not be swept away by them. That authority was what I sought, and no Protestant denomination can credibly claim it; only a body which can trace itself and its doctrine back to the very beginning can do so. Which is not to say that the Bible doesn’t matter; a book has the advantage of not changing; the book and the living authority balance each other.
The Orthodox churches, of course, are a different thing altogether, being clearly connected to apostolic tradition. The Catholic-Protestant division is a calamity, but the Catholic-Orthodox division is almost a fatal wound to the whole concept of apostolic authority. Almost.
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