Transcript

I watch a lot of interactions between Catholics and Protestants on social media, and I've noticed four things Catholics often say to Protestants that they really shouldn't.

So let's take a look at what not to say.

Number one, Protestant churches are always ugly, Catholic churches are always beautiful.

Recently, I came across this meme showing a simple church allegedly being the most ornate Protestant church and a beautiful Catholic church being the least ornate Catholic church.

And when I hear that I say, What kind of incense have you been smoking?

Most Catholic churches I've attended are bland or beige, as Bishop Barron might say.

They aren't hideous, but they aren't memorable either.

They're just the product of uninspired architectural trends in the 1970s, and you don't get to ignore them because you just really want to dunk on Protestant architecture.

In fact, the atrocious example of church architecture I used in my episode on why liberals love ugly art was the Catholic Newman Center at UC Berkeley.

Now, it's true, a lot of Protestant churches are also bland, but there are Protestant churches that have beautiful architectural designs that inspire genuine awe in those who see them.

There's the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, built to rival St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, the Hallgrímskirkja in Iceland, and St. Matthew's Lutheran Church in Charleston.

Finally, the Catholic church in this meme is the San Augustine Church in the Philippines.

It's a 400-year-old church in a country where 80% of the population is Catholic.

In contrast, the simple Protestant church in this meme is a church in Algeria where the population is 99% Muslim.

Christians have very limited religious freedom in the country, and the government recently closed churches for allegedly not being registered with them.

According to this article, Youcef Ourahman, the leader of a Protestant church in Algeria, has denounced the closure of his church, which has been around for more than 20 years.

Last November, local authorities closed the church, claiming it had been used to, quote, Illegally print gospels and publications intended for evangelism.

Unless you have the benefit of a basilica that already existed when Algeria was a French colony, you're going to have trouble building an ornate Christian church in the country today.

But I'd rather praise these Protestants for risking their freedom to spread the gospel and dialogue with them about the nature of the church than simply take potshots at them for the simple way they express their worship of God.

Now, it's fair to point out problems in major elements of Protestant architecture, like how some Protestants will engage in altar calls even though there is no altar in their church for people to approach.

But saying Protestant churches are all always ugly is like saying Protestant churches are all just a bunch of rock concerts or TED Talks.

That's true for some of them, but there's also banal, cringey Catholic liturgies.

And as I noted in my episode on the Protestant worship problem, there are some Protestant churches that have retained at least the appearance of classical liturgies, and the problem is with the deeper theology of the Eucharist and the role of the liturgy.

So let's talk about that instead of trying to pick out the speck in a Protestant's eye while ignoring the beige 1970s plank of wood in our own Catholic eyes.

Number two, sola scriptura has split the church into 33,000 Protestant denominations.

It is true that making the Bible the only infallible rule of faith and rebuking the idea of a universal living magisterium has gravely damaged the body of Christ and allowed serious theological errors to spread, but Catholics shouldn't be hyperbolic when pointing this out.

And it is hyperbolic to say this has resulted in 33,000 different Protestant denominations.

This figure comes from the World Christian Encyclopedia by Barratt, Currian, and Johnson.

It says the following: A denomination is defined in this encyclopedia as an organized aggregate of worship centers or congregations of similar ecclesiastical tradition within a specific country, i.e., as an organized Christian church or tradition or religious group or community of believers.

As defined here, world Christianity consists of six major ecclesiastico-cultural blocks divided into 300 major ecclesiastical traditions composed of over 33,000 distinct denominations in 238 countries.

End quote.

Now, this definition includes not just Protestants, but also Catholics and Eastern Orthodox in the 33,000.

The encyclopedia says there are 9,000 Protestant denominations and 22,000 independent ones, but the number is only this high if you say the Baptist Church of Mexico is a different denomination than the Baptist Church of Guatemala, even though they probably believe the same doctrines.

We know the encyclopedia makes this kind of error because it falsely claims that there are 242 different denominations of Catholicism, but that doesn't mean there are 242 separate denominations with conflicting belief systems within the Catholic faith.

That's not true at all.

The truth is, we have no idea how many Protestant denominations exist because there are so many independent Protestant and evangelical churches in strip malls and house churches.

But ultimately, that number doesn't matter.

For example, it doesn't take tens of thousands of heresies to throw Christendom into chaos.

A few dozen heresies would do the trick.

Likewise, even if there were only a few dozen different Protestant denominations, properly speaking, that would still be far more than the one universal church our Lord desired when He prayed to the Father, Keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.

Ultimately, the number of Christian denominations isn't the issue.

A Protestant could say that the Byzantine or Syro-Malabar Catholic Churches are separate denominations, but they only differ from other Catholics in legitimate customs, not essential doctrines.

The real problem, which I've addressed on this channel numerous times, is that Protestantism leads to divisions in the body of Christ between churches on the very dogmas God wants us to know and that we so that we can truly know Him and have eternal life.

Let's focus on those essential issues and the ways that God has given us to know what He's revealed, rather than on quibbling about exactly how many Protestant denominations exist.

Oh, and before I get to number three, a runner-up would be this: people who say, Don't support the Council of Trent if you're not Catholic.

We have many Catholic supporters here at the channel, but we also have non-Catholics who support our work defending God's existence, Christ's resurrection, and basic moral truths like the wrongness of abortion.

If you wanna help us equip anyone of goodwill, Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise, then please subscribe to this channel and support us financially at trenthornpodcast.com.

For as little as $5 a month or $50 a year, you get access to bonus content and you keep the Council of Trent sponsor-free.

So check it out at trenthornpodcast.com.

All right, number three, Martin Luther and John Calvin were depraved.

Protestants don't treat Martin Luther and John Calvin as infallible orators or mini-popes.

I know Calvinists who proudly say that John Calvin would have had them burnt at the stake for some of their theological views.

Just as it isn't helpful for a Protestant to harp on the immorality of some of the medieval popes when he's trying to reach a Catholic, it doesn't help Catholics trying to reach Protestants for us to harp on the alleged immoralities of Calvin and Luther.

Even if the allegations were true, they don't prove anything substantial.

Luther and Calvin, though, did have their fair share of culpable faults, like any person, but some Catholics take the low road and spread propaganda against these men which just isn't helpful.

All it does is make Catholics look ignorant, some of which I've addressed in a previous episode I'll link to in the description below.

For example, some Catholics say that John Calvin was actually gay and that Martin Luther visited prostitutes.

Concerning Calvin, these Catholics say that Calvin was convicted of sodomy when he was 18 years old in his hometown of Noyon, France.

However, the source of this rumor, Jerome Bolsec, had previously debated Calvin on predestination and he had a bitter grudge against Calvin.

R. Scott Clark, a professor of church history at Westminster Seminary, points out that when John Calvin was 18 he was studying law at the University of Orleans, 150 miles away from Noyon, and the town registry doesn't record this particular crime.

Plus, if this had happened, then the scandal of his arrest would have prevented Calvin from completing his study at Orleans or his degree at Bourgieous a few years later, so this is an urban legend.

When it comes to Martin Luther and the prostitutes, this probably comes from Patrick O'Hare's book, The Facts About Luther, a 1916 work that is extremely critical of Martin Luther and extremely lacking in its factual research.

It says of Luther, The evidences of his depravity are so overwhelming and convincing that they are forced to the conclusion that this shameless advocate of brazen prostitution could not be and was not a messenger of the All-Holy God.

But that's incorrect.

Martin Luther was famous for demanding that brothels be closed down and he contradicted Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who tolerated legal prostitution in order to prevent what they called the uncontrolled spread of lust.

Other people take Martin Luther quotes out of context to make him sound as bad as possible.

This includes quotes like this one, Be a sinner, and sin boldly.

No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day.

This makes it sound like Martin Luther thought a Christian could never lose his salvation, which is not true.

Luther said that baptism throws away unbelief, but through sin, people could fall away into unbelief and soil themselves again in filth.

Instead, this was a personal letter to his friend, Philip Melanchthon, of which Martin Luther biographer, Eric Metaxas, says the following, Luther was hardly saying that Melanchthon should try to sin, as many have misinterpreted the quotation, but that he should forget about trying not to sin, because in the end this was not possible.

He must understand that in all that we do, we will doubtless sin .

But if your faith is in Christ, who has already defeated sin and paid for our sins on the cross, we are redeemed.

So this is hyperbolic language meant to underscore the depths of God's mercy, that there's no sin that He can't forgive.

Now, of course there are severe deficiencies and errors in Luther's soteriology that can be rightly critiqued, but it's not fair to focus on a person's rhetoric to the exclusion of the substance of his view.

Doing that is no different than Protestants thinking they can debunk Catholic mariology by just complaining about grandiose language in something like The Glories of Mary by Saint Alphonsus Liguori, or complaining about a random tweet they saw that was over-the-top in its description of Mary.

If we as Catholics would want Protestants to engage the substance of our faith, then we must be willing to do the same with what Protestants believe.

And number four, Protestants don't believe in repentance or church history.

Now, there are some Protestants who blatantly ignore church history or think that good works have absolutely nothing to do with our salvation.

For example, free grace theologians, like Robert Wilken, believe that repentance and good works are not necessary for salvation, even as a sign that one is saved.

But other Protestants, like John MacArthur, reject this view and say repentance is necessary, but that it's not a work that earns salvation.

Repentance from this view is just the natural consequence of accepting Jesus as Lord.That's why this view among Protestants has been called lordship salvation.

Only a few Protestants embrace the antinomian heresy that says we can be degenerate people and still be saved.

But in reaction to that heresy, some Catholics have imposed a kind of Pelagianism or legalism that makes works necessary, even for our initial salvation, which the church does not teach.

For example, some people, including Catholics, have criticized Nala, a former pornographer turned Christian, for not giving away the large amounts of money that she made while she produced pornography.

Some went so far as to claim that Nala's claim she doesn't have to give her money away in order to be saved shows Protestantism is wrong, and that you do have to do good works in order to be saved.

Now, I'm not gonna comment on Nala's current work as an influencer and some of the controversial things that she's said.

My point is just that Catholicism teaches you do not have to do good works, including giving up money you earned from evils like prostitution or performing abortions.

You do not have to do that in order to be saved.

When we are baptized, and I'm assuming Nala's baptism was valid, the eternal and temporal punishment for our sins is removed from our souls.

You don't have to do anything to make up for past sins after you've received baptism because baptism washes away all sin and all of the effects of sin.

What baptism, as well as absolution and the sacrament of confession does not do is give us a license to commit new sins.

For example, if you were a car thief and then converted and received baptism, or even just went to confession, you would still have to return the cars you stole.

You don't have to do that to make your baptism valid since no future act has any bearing on the validity of your past baptism.

Instead, your baptism doesn't communicate forgiveness of sins committed after baptism, and every day you retain the stolen cars entails a new sin of theft that was not remitted in baptism.

Likewise, if you genuinely express sorrow and confession for stealing cars, but you change your mind later and you don't return the cars, then you have committed the sin of theft all over again, and you're no longer in a state of grace.

This is why the tax collector Zacchaeus told Jesus that he would return money to anyone he defrauded, and this declaration showed that he genuinely converted.

However, if you made money doing something wrong instead of taking what rightfully belonged to others, such as if you were dealing drugs or making pornography or committing abortions, you would not have to give away the money you made in order to be forgiven of your sins, because keeping the money would not be a continuation of the sin of theft.

It would be saintly and heroic for you to give the money away, but it would not be necessary for your salvation because you aren't morally required to return the money to those who freely gave it to you when they purchased an evil thing from you.

Saint Thomas Aquinas covers this in the Summa Theologiae in the section on the question, whether one may give alms out of ill-gotten goods.

Aquinas says there are three ways to get money when you should not have gotten it.

If money is simply stolen, he says, A man may not give alms of it, since he is bound to restore them.

In the second case, if someone gives you stolen money that can't be lawfully returned, then the money should be given to the poor.

Aquinas then says there is a third case of bad money.

He writes, A thing is ill-gotten, not because the taking was unlawful, but because it is the outcome of something unlawful, as in the case of a woman's profits from whoredom.

This is filthy lucre, properly so called, because the practice of whoredom is filthy and against the law of God.

Yet the woman does not act unjustly or unlawfully in taking the money.

Consequently, it is lawful to keep and to give in alms what is thus acquired by an unlawful action.

End quote.

So to give another example, if you were an abortionist who became Catholic and your home and your car were paid with blood money, you would not be bound to give those things away in order to remain in a state of grace.

You might feel God personally call you to make that sacrifice, and you're free to make a heroic witness through such a sacrifice, but salvation is a free gift of God, and putting extra burdens on people in order for them to be saved contradicts the gospel.

So let's not give Protestants who claim Catholics are ignorant of the gospel any unnecessary ammunition for that false charge against us.

And when it comes to church history, a lot of Catholics like to quote Cardinal Henry Newman, who said, To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.

I think this quote, though, often comes off as triumphalist to many Protestants, and it can be ignorant to some Protestants who really have engaged church history and the church fathers.

It is true that Protestant apologists from even two generations ago didn't care much about the fathers.

They ended up getting steamrolled in debates with apologists like Carl Keating and Patrick Madrid.

But now you have Protestant apologists who bring the church fathers to bear, as you can see in my responses to James White and Gavin Ortlund on the church fathers on several issues.

Although in many cases, modern Protestants who cite the fathers often just follow what 19th-century Protestant theologians said about them, like Philip Schaff and others, many of whom come from the Anglican tradition.

So I would say Newman's quote is more accurately rendered, To be deep in history is to cease to be non-denominational, or, To be deep in history is to cease to be evangelical.

From there, you can engage Protestants who try to follow in the Reformers' footsteps in trying to reclaim the fathers for themselves and point out where they go wrong.

John Calvin said in a 1539 letter to Cardinal Sadoleto, You know, Sadoleto, not only that our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours, but that all we have attempted has been to renew the ancient form of the Church.

Now, I don't believe that's correct, but Catholics should at least acknowledge those Protestants who try to harmonize their doctrines with the historical Christian witness and then graciously point out the flaws in the arguments that they're making.

So let's raise the level of discourse between Catholics and Protestants.

Uh, this is why we've redesigned this studio so we can start to have in-person dialogues on these important issues.

And if you wanna help us have these dialogues and continue to produce these episodes, please support us at trenthornpodcast.com.

This will allow us to bring in all kinds of non-Catholic guests to have good-natured conversations and avoid the bad things I've shared with you in this episode of what you should not say to Protestants.

So thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.