The Real Problem with Asking “Are Catholics Christian?”

Were not Christians. Now, if you’re a Protestant Christian, you’ve probably never been in this situation. I’ve never heard anyone ask our Methodist Christians, even though we might disagree about some important questions unless they genuinely don’t know what a Methodist is. But this happens frequently enough by well-meaning ignorant Protestants that in fact, while I was putting this video together, a patron on my Patreon, shameless joe.com shared that when he told his own mother that he was going to become Catholic, she said just kind of casually that he wouldn’t be a Christian anymore. So today, as I sort of hinted, I want to address two groups of people. Number one, Catholics to know better how to react if you find yourself in this situation of somebody saying this to you, and number two, Protestants honestly, so you don’t embarrass yourself by making these kinds of claims without having a better understanding of what you’re talking about.

And I want to say that in love honestly, before I address three ways I think we should respond to the question. I want to talk about two ways that we shouldn’t, and here I certainly have Catholics in view for like, don’t do this. Don’t get defensive. First of all, because it’s really easy to have a kind of emotional speed bump, understandably, right? It’s a tall order for me to tell you. Don’t get defensive when somebody’s making a very insulting accusation about you being told that you’re not a Christian. As a Christian is about the worst thing somebody could say about you. So just imagine someone making a very insulting declaration about your character and about your person. You’re naturally going to want to defend yourself and you’re probably going to get emotionally fired up and everything else. Again, I understand that. I empathize with that, but I would nevertheless tell you, watch out for that because I don’t think it’s productive.

I would encourage you to remember five things. Number one, remember the other person’s awkwardness. Now put yourself in their shoes because chances are you’ve found yourself having to confront a brother or sister about something. Maybe it’s a sin or maybe it’s just something of a non-moral character. Say for instance, you’ve got friend who just smells really bad and as a friend you got to say something that’s an uncomfortable situation for both of you, right? You didn’t want this, and so the least helpful thing to do in that kind of situation is to get defensive in a way that just increases the awkwardness. Instead, move against that. Try to dispel the awkwardness. Be gracious about it even if you’ve been insulted unjustly. Second, recognize the other person’s good intentions. When Marlon shared his theory about why he didn’t think Catholics were Christians, he was quick to say, I say this with love, and you know what?

I believe him. I think he’s wrong in what are some pretty obvious ways, but I also believe his motives are pure and maybe even holy, and so I don’t want to knock that too much, right? I think he is misguided, not malicious. Now, with all of this, you can imagine another kind of set of examples. Maybe the person isn’t telling you you smell because they’re your friend and they love you. Maybe they’re telling you you smell because they don’t like you and they’re being malicious. I’m not talking about that, right? I’m talking about the person who, whether they’re right or wrong tells you, I think you’re an error. I think you’re in sin. I think you’re not a Christian. I think you smell whatever it is in that situation. Don’t get defensive even if you know they’re wrong, even if you know they’re wrong because you want to respond by recognizing the bravery honestly, that it took them to confront you and the awkwardness that they’ve created for themselves as well as for you and their good intentions for being willing to undergo what they knew would be an unpleasant situation for your good.

That’s something to respect and to honor, and that leads then naturally to that third thing. It’s much easier. Remember this, it’s much easier for them to have just talked about you behind your back on more than one occasion. I had this happen at a Protestant wedding. I had this happen in a Bible study where I was the only Catholic. I’ve encountered situations where Protestants have said stuff about Catholics not being Christians, and then they find out I’m Catholic and then they get really awkward. They didn’t want to say that to a Catholic. They wanted to say it about Catholics. I get that sometimes you have an awkward situation where, I dunno if I can go to this wedding, you want to talk to somebody else is kind of on the same page, but I don’t really have a ton of respect for that, meaning I don’t have a ton of respect for it.

When you talk ill of others behind their back while being too cowardly to confront them head on. Now it’s fine if you’re just saying, help me understand this situation. I’m not speaking about that, but someone who’s convinced Catholics aren’t Christians, and both of the cases I’m thinking about in my own life, that was the case. They weren’t asking. They were declaring, but then they didn’t want to declare it to a Catholic. They wanted to declare it to other Calvinists. But that sort of thing, I think whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, we should recognize is clearly un-Christian. That is not what we’re called to do as Christian. There’s model for how you approach when a brother is airing. There’s a model for how you confront error and all of this and that’s not it. And so when someone comes to you appreciate the fact that they didn’t take the easy road, they did the harder thing of coming to you.

The fourth thing, remember how Jesus responded to insulting and false accusations In John chapter eight, Jesus’ opponents claimed he wasn’t really Jewish. They call him a Samaritan and a demoniac that is at least as insulting as being told that you’re not a Christian, right? If I said, you’re not a Christian and also you’re possessed by the devil, okay, I’ve made that already insulting, accusation even worse. And so Jesus could have easily and even justly responded with outrage, but he doesn’t do that in response to the claim that the king of the Jews isn’t really a Jew. We find him responding with grace and humility, but also defending himself directly, addressing their objection, telling them they’re wrong, but without getting defensive, defending without defensiveness, and that’s the model we should be following here. And fifth and finally, we want to recognize that defensiveness tends to shut a conversation down.

If you seem too sensitive to handle criticism, other people are less likely to criticize you to your face. They’ll continue to think negative things about you. They might even share negative things about you to other people, but they’re not going to confront them to you in a way where you could change or correct the record or have a helpful conversation. And so that kind of defensiveness is really counterproductive for them and for you, because you can’t clarify things. It’s a bad outcome all around, they just come away thinking you’re not a Christian. You come away oblivious to the fact that people are saying that kind of thing about you. That’s a problem. And so in all of this, I’m absolutely assuming the best, I’m assuming the person who tells you, I don’t think Catholics or Christians is acting out of a spirit of Christian charity, albeit misguided.

You will find people who are bitter or defensive or just spiteful or trolling or whatever. I’m not talking about those cases. If you don’t know, if you’re not sure which categories a person’s in you would do well to assume that they’re doing it charitably, assume. In other words, the best motives, and we’re going to get more into this and a little more depth as we go. Okay? So that’s the first thing not to do. Don’t get defensive. Second, and this is maybe more surprising, I would suggest don’t debate the finer points of their theological objection. Now, I realize that probably sounds completely counterintuitive and this, I mean I’m speaking very generally here. I would make exceptions to this. If you’re a trained theologian or debater, apologist, whatever, if you know a particular subject matter really well and somebody confronts you about it, if you’re just finished your dissertation on the topic and somebody spouts off something about how Catholics aren’t Christians because, and then they mention your dissertation topic, fine have at that.

But ordinarily that’s not what’s going on, right? Ordinarily it’s a case where you weren’t expecting to have to defend why you’re a Christian and the person confronting you has a whole set of theological ideas that are wrong or at least wildly different than your own. And there’s a lot of work to do to even come to any kind of common understanding. So oftentimes, and I’ll focus on this throughout this video for what I think are going to be clear reasons, when Protestants claim Catholics aren’t Christians, it is I think more often than not based on the idea that we interpret St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians in a different way than they do when St. Paul says that we are justified by faith and not by works of the mosaic law. We think that means that we’re justified by faith and not by works of the mosaic law.

They think that means we’re justified by faith alone apart from anything other than faith. Now, quite frankly, you can read either of those in the text, both of those can make sense of Paul’s writings to the Romans orations. We’ll get into more of why that matters, right? And so just to give a couple examples of this kind of coming up, John bi, he is the founder of G three, which is the G three conference is one of the largest evangelical conferences in the us. It draws thousands of people, and so he’s a pretty big deal and he wrote a piece in two 2023 about why he thinks Catholics aren’t Christians, and I’m going to take a closer look at that in a few minutes here, but very much at the heart of it. It’s this idea that we believe in salvation by faith, but not salvation by faith alone.

So he acknowledges we believe in the necessity of faith but not alone. Now, strikingly that word alone famously is not in St. Paul’s letters. The only time you see faith alone as a phrase is in James two where James explicitly says, we’re not justified by faith alone. Fine, we can get into that whole deep dive. I’m actually not going to do that, and for this simple reason, if you try to get into the deep dive about why this distorts St. Paul’s theology, whyt pitch Paul against St. James and so on, there is a time and place for that, a formal debate or another avenue where both of you have had time to research and prepare and all of that, but it’s probably not going to be in the context where you’re being told you’re not a Christian. It is just probably not going to be the time to have the formal debate, but there’s also a more foundational thing that I’m surprised more people don’t talk about, and that’s this the word Catholic.

It means universal. We have the whole and we have the whole with all the pieces working together. And so it always feels confusing and complicated for people who have a simpler heretical system, and I don’t mean that again, pejoratively, I just mean that descriptively because nearly every major Christian heresy works in the same basic way. Number one, there’s a fixation you fixate on a particular part of scripture, whether that’s a particular book or a few books or whether that’s a particular doctrine or theme. That’s number one you take apart, apart from the whole. Number two, you then interpret it in a way contrary to the way it’s been traditionally understood by Christians. So you make the whole thing about the mosaic law or justification by faith alone or predestination or speaking in tongues or fill in the blank. It all works the same way. You interpret it in a way where, oh, you have to speak in tongues to be truly saved.

That sort of thing. What are they doing? They’re taking a theme speaking in tongues, which is in scripture, and then they’re interpreting it in a way that isn’t the traditional understanding of that doctrine. You can do this across the board. Then number three, you then interpret the rest of scripture either through the lens of your fixation or you just kind of ignore the rest of scripture. You talk about justification by faith alone and how all that you need for salvation is faith and just that’s all that matters. And then you get these uncomfortable passages like Jesus’s separation of the sheep and goats where he talks about the judgment of the world and he looks at what people don’t do in terms of their works and he doesn’t even mention faith, and you just kind of gloss over those parts. You just kind of ignore them.

Or you say, well, obviously he’s presupposing faith and this is just the outgrowth of that faith. So even though he doesn’t mention faith, he really meant the sheep of those who have faith and the ghosts are those who don’t. You reinterpret all the passages and these often very counterintuitive ways through the lens of your presuppositions because of your fixation. That’s how almost every heresy works. This is also, by the way, how plenty of other things that aren’t theological work like conspiracy theories. It’s you take a fixation about one thing and you make it kind of a grand idea through which you view the rest of reality. Now, the temptation in these cases is to attack the fixation to say, I’m going to debate you about why your fixation is wrong. No, you shouldn’t read the whole of scripture through law and gospel. No, you shouldn’t read the whole of scripture through dispensational theology.

No, you shouldn’t read the whole of scripture through a restorationists lens. That’s tempting. That is usually folly for a few reasons. The chief reason is because this is their fixation and not yours. They’ve probably read a lot more than you have. It doesn’t mean they’re right, but it does mean it’s going to be much easier for them to surprise you with some chapter and verse you didn’t remember then for you to do the same for them. There are exceptions to this. I’ve encountered times, I had a time where I had a Protestant street preacher tell me, you won’t find anything in the Bible that says baptism saves. And then I had him read one Peter 3 21 with me in his own Bible, and he was flummox for a second, but then he said, well, one Peter wasn’t written to Christians, it was written to Jews.

So even then he found a way to reinterpret it according to his fixation. That sort of thing is why attacking the fixation directly usually doesn’t work. There is a better way. I’m going to address a better way in a moment, but I would just say this in general. So debating someone who is really fixated on sofie, on sofie is usually not the way the ordinary Christian should go about it, but this is true across the board. You’ve got some Protestants believe that we all need to be keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, and I’ll bet they know the verses about the Sabbath more readily than you do. Mormons who are convinced that Amos eight predicts a great apostasy, it doesn’t, but I bet they know Amos eight better than you do. Let’s take opposite examples. You got on the one hand, oneness Pentecostals, they believe Jesus and the Father are just different names or roles for the same divine person, so they don’t believe in one God, three persons, they believe in one God, one person.

Then you have the Jehovah’s Witnesses, almost the opposite, where they believe that Jesus and Father are not the same person, but in fact they’re not even the same being that God the Father is God and Jesus is not God. Now, obviously those two things can’t both be true. Jesus can’t both be the Father and not be God at all, and we would say both of them are actually false. But here’s the thing, I would venture that ordinary Trinitarian, Christians, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox confronted with a one that’s Pentecostal or Jehovah’s witness will find themselves kind of frantic and scrambling because those guys are used to having to defend their non Trinitarian theology way more than most Christians are prepared to defend Trinitarian theology because we’re not constantly attacked on it, right? If you are a non Trinitarian who believes you’re a Christian, you’re used to hearing trinitarians tell you, we don’t even think you’re a Christian because you don’t believe in the Trinity.

It’s so foundational precisely for that reason. They often know those verses better. So again, I want to be completely clear. There is a time and place to debate the fixation, and there are people who even off the cuff have the theological, rhetorical, apologetic kind of skills to do that immediately. That is not all of us. And so you have enough self-knowledge to know, am I finding myself being sucked into a debate on a topic I wasn’t prepared for and they were because that’s probably not going to go well, and that doesn’t mean that you don’t believe the right thing you can be right, and that’s still the case. So having said all that, that’s what not to do. You might then wonder, okay, well then what in the world am I supposed to do? So let’s talk about that. Number one, seek to understand why.

Now, I’ll acknowledge this is not as much fun as just immediately bashing people over the head, but this is way more important. It’s way more productive. You’ll never answer their objections to Catholicism and why they think we’re not Christian if you don’t first understand what they even think Catholics believe, and so allow them to present their own view on what Catholics believe. Now, along the way, you should keep two important distinctions in mind. Number one, recognize the difference between saying, I disagree with the Catholic church’s teaching on X and the much bolder claim. Anyone who believes the Catholic church is teaching on X isn’t even a Christian. Now we can maybe understand why someone doesn’t see the wisdom of the church’s teaching on X, Y, Z doctrine, and so people who think Catholics aren’t Christians tend to just want to debate the merits of who’s right on justification, who’s right on the role of tradition or the role of the church or the necessity of baptism or whatever.

But that’s all at that first level. I disagree with the Catholic church on these issues, but if you’re going to say the Catholic church isn’t Christian, you have to say the second thing that anyone who disagrees with my reading of scripture as a Protestant doesn’t even get to count as a Christian. So if you’re going to tell me that I have to not just agree with St. Paul on justification, which I do to the best of my knowledge, I also have to agree with your interpretation of Paul. You got to tell me why. So as a Catholic listening, you want to be listening for two things. Number one, what do they think Catholics believe? And number two, are they giving you reasons why you have to agree with them In order to be Christian? Chances are you’re going to find a very fruitful amount of errors in the first thing to have a fruitful conversation, and we’ll get into what to do next in a second.

But there’s a second important distinction because look, remember if this person isn’t just like a total troll, chances are they’re very uncomfortable with the fact that they’ve sort of said you’re going to hell, right? They’ve just said you’re not a Christian, and so they’re going to want to quickly backtrack and create an escape hatch because it’s pretty clear in Christianity that we’re not to just be judging and condemning other people to hell all the time, and so they’ll say, well, maybe you’re saved in some way, so we want to keep this distinction in mind as well. It’s great that they acknowledge that maybe you’re going to heaven, but that’s not the question. The question here isn’t whether some Catholics are going to heaven or not. It’s great that we can agree on that. The question is whether the Catholic church is Christian. Notice what happens.

First, you’re keeping the topic clear. You’re not wandering off course, but second, it forces a conversation not just about theology, but about what a church even is. And I’ll tell you historically, Protestants are very, very weak on having given much thought to even what it means to be the church or having looked at what scripture says about the idea of the church. So already, just by keeping the question in view, we’re not talking about the individual salvation of an individual believer known only to God. We’re talking about whether the Catholic church is a true church, whether the Catholic church is Christian. Notice the difference there. You’re not going to be able to solve number one, maybe the person has a deathbed conversion. You don’t know. Maybe the person says all the right things, but in their heart they secretly deny God. You don’t know those things, right?

God alone knows those things. That’s not going to be a corrective conversation, but you can have the conversation of where is the church described in the Bible or what does it even mean to be a Christian? Those conversations are objective, they’re external. We can have those kinds of discussions. So then the second thing to do after you listen is to gently correct. Now, I think there’s a few things to bear in mind here. The first is called Lin’s razor never prescribed to malice. What could also be attributed to stupidity? Now, I say this because as soon as this person lays out their case about what Catholics believe and why, overwhelmingly in my experience, it takes very little time for you to start hearing these wild distortions of Catholic theology, these outright errors and falsehoods. I’m going to give some examples in a second here. When that happens, don’t assume they’re being malicious.

Now, I know Hanlon’s Razor says stupidity. It’s sufficient to say ignorance. We don’t even have to assume they’re stupid because even smart people find themselves in situations where they don’t understand what other people believe. It’s hard enough to accurately describe your own beliefs to somebody else. It’s much harder to accurately describe their beliefs to them. This is true whether we’re talking about theology or if you were to say, Hey, describe this other culture, chances are your description of another country culture, whatever, is not going to be the same way people understand their own culture, their own country, whatever, right? You’re going to probably get some things wrong and that’s fine. That’s grounds for a good conversation, and this happens by the way, in both directions. I’ve heard Catholics who grew up Catholic describing what Protestants believe, as if Protestants are a monolith in ways that are often really cringe inducing, and I try not to do that.

I’ve had times where I’ve said things about such and such Protestant group where I’ve realized later like, oh, that wasn’t a very good way of describing that, or I got that detail wrong or whatever. So even when you’re trying your best, even when you’re a person of goodwill and you’ve put some time and effort into understanding mistakes are going to happen in both directions when that happens, you have an opportunity and a duty as a Christian. That opportunity and duty is spoken of in two Timothy 2 24 to 26. Now, this Bible passage more than any others is kind of the hallmark of the whole approach that I’m arguing for in there. St. Paul says this, the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher forbearing correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth and they may escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will.

Like that is a great reminder of several things. Number one, there’s a spiritual warfare element to all of this. The mention of the role of the devil is important. This isn’t just two people debating. This is a spiritual war and in a spiritual war you want to act in an upright and just way you don’t want to do anything unbecoming you as a Christian. To that end, number two, don’t go out just looking for the sake of a fight. That’s quarrelsome number three. That said, if the fight comes to you, if somebody opposes you, if they’re in error, if they’re saying things publicly that are mistaken, you may have the duty to correct your opponent, and he even says opponent. He doesn’t beat around the bush and say, oh, your brother who goes astray. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like that. Sometimes it feels like an opponent.

Now, elsewhere like Ephesians six, he reminds us that our true opponent isn’t flesh and blood, but powers and principalities. That’s the spiritual warfare point, but it is fine to recognize we are actually opponents in a debate. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect you and love you, we disagree. We oppose one another on this point and I’m going to correct you. Why? Because I love you and I want to see the salvation of your soul. I want to lead to your repentance in your coming back into the truth. That’s what St. Paul says. This is good, but that then of course leads to the fourth point if that’s what this is really about. If you’re acting in an upright way in a spiritual war, correcting others for the sake of their own good, then you have to do it gently. You can’t just be a jerk about it because that doesn’t help them.

You have to be motivated by something more than the rush of euphoria you get for being right in vanquishing someone else who’s wrong. That’s not good enough as a Christian, as a debater, as an apologist, as someone on the spot in this, you can’t just tear people down. You have to help point them towards the truth gently and lovingly. So I want to now try to do that. I mentioned before Josh by who has a big platform as the head of G three. He has this article about why he says Roman Catholicism is not Christianity, and the article is short. It’s under 2000 words, and it is littered with basic factual errors. I don’t mean that we disagree on some theological interpretations, that is also true. I mean, he repeatedly makes claims about what Catholics believe that are diametrically opposed to what Catholics actually believe.

Again, in a very short piece, he makes the following mistakes. Number one, he claims that according to official Roman Catholic doctrine, in order for a person to be saved, it’s quite a tedious task because there are several steps you need to be saved. This is his wording, right, and one of those steps according to him is we need indulgences to be saved, and he goes on to say in the next sentence or two sentences later, excuse me, that he’ll support his argument with citations from the catechism of the Catholic church in That just isn’t true on this point. He doesn’t look at what the catechism says on indulgences because if he did, he’d realize he’s completely wrong. We don’t think you need indulgences to be saved. In fact, an unsafe person can’t receive indulgences. Paragraph 1471 is absolutely explicit about this, that indulgences are only for those sin whose guilt has already been forgiven, namely the faithful Christian who was duly disposed.

Now, you can agree or disagree with indulgences, but an indulgence is not. You weren’t saved and now you are because of this indulgence. That’s just the opposite of what the Catholic Church teaches. There’s plenty of other places you could go because he mentions the catechism. You can find it right there in the catechism. He is just completely wrong on what the church teaches on indulgences in their role in this spiritual life. Second, he accuses Catholics of adding to faith other works of men including the church. Now, that’s pretty striking because in Matthew 1618, Jesus says to Simon, Peter, you are Peter and on this rock, I’ll build my church. Now, Catholics and Protestants can disagree about what Jesus means upon this rock. We can even disagree about what he means by church, but one thing that should be abundantly clear to any faithful Protestant or any faithful Catholic is Jesus says, I will build my church.

That is the church is not a manmade work. The church is the work of Christ himself. In Ephesians one, St. Paul describes how God has put all things under Christ’s feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body. The fullness of him that is the church is the fullness of Christ. That’s not a manmade work explicitly. The biblical teaching, which is what Catholics and I think Protestants believe in, is that the church understood biblically ease of divine and not human origin. Now, you can say, I don’t think the Catholic church is that church, but that’s the conclusion he’s trying to get to. You can’t just assume that conclusion and say Catholics are bad because they think the church is divine. Scripture thinks the church is divine and origin. It’s not a manmade work biblically. I think this is a point we agree on, so this is another just basic factual error.

Now, I’m going to skip over other things. He says throughout the article, for instance, he claims it’s blasphemous that we say that baptism saves you even though one Peter 3 21 explicitly says, baptism saves you because I want to actually focus again just on the really clear black and white errors, just factual errors. We’re not going to count that as a third error, but I want to just say there are plenty of things like that throughout the piece where he’s making some bizarre theological claims that seem easily disproved from scripture. But instead, the third black and white error will say is when he says The Roman Catholic Church does not embrace Protestant Christians as brothers and sisters in Christ to this very day, why would we embrace Roman Catholics as Christians? Look, this is just bafflingly wrong. I’m genuinely unsure of how he made this error because the language of brothers and sisters is explicitly used by the church.

The Second Vatican Council repeatedly refers to Protestants as our separated brethren, brethren, meaning brothers and sisters. Now, that’s not new either. That emphasis on Protestants as our brothers and sisters. There is a shift towards that kind of language in the Second Vatican Council, but you can find at least as far back as St. Tatu in the fourth century, this idea that heretical Christians are still our brothers and sisters in Christ. Even if they don’t acknowledge us as Christians, even if they don’t repay us that favor, we don’t engage in that well, why would we embrace them as Christians if they don’t embrace us because we’re Christians and because we say our father, not my father, and so we have a duty to recognize other true Christians even if they don’t recognize us, if the, I should say it’s not part of the body, we should still recognize it as part of the body.

That’s our duty. That’s why, and so this idea that we don’t do that towards Protestants is just demonstrably kind of bizarrely untrue. It’d be like saying, I don’t like the Catholic church because it doesn’t have a headquarter in the Vatican. I don’t even know what to make of that claim. I can’t evaluate the merits of the argument because the argument is just obviously false. Okay, the last thing I want to focus on just in his piece is another poll quote. That last one and this one are what are called poll quotes. When you pull something out of a short article and you kind of plug it to make sure the reader notices it and you put it in big letters and all this, the next poll quote is his claim that when the Bible was unleashed in the common man’s language, beginning with Martin Lutheran German, followed by William Tindell in English, it took the control away from the Roman Catholic Church and that this was the spark of the reformation.

Now, this is obviously wrong in two ways. First, the Bible had already been translated into the commons man’s language. He mentions German and Yuha, I hope I’m pronouncing his name right, it’s Hungarian, I believe. He points out that before Luther translated his German Bible in 1522, there were already at least 18 complete editions of the German Bible, and in addition, there were some 90 different editions of the gospels and 14 editions of the Salter, like the collection of the Psalms, and overall, if you step back from Germany and just look at Europe more broadly, there were about 70,000 Bibles, 120,000 salters and a hundred thousand New Testaments that had been printed in various languages throughout Europe. Remember, the printing press was still very young at this point, but we see the Bible being spread all over the place oftentimes in the common man’s language, and you don’t have to take my word for this or his word for this.

You can literally see copies of these pre Lutheran German Bibles on the library of Congress’s website. This idea that Martin Luther was the first to put the Bible into the common man’s language is just a very obvious myth. It’s a falsehood, but second, this also wasn’t the spark of the reformation. Now, historians tend to describe sparks of different historical events in various ways. There’s plenty of room for debate on a lot of these things. So for instance, historians typically think the spark of World War I was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in June 28th, 1914, and five years later to the day the war was concluded, world War I was concluded with the Treaty of Versailles. Now, other people might say, well, the real spark of World War I was something before Fran Ferdinand was killed. There’s all sorts of debate about that, but imagine somebody who said, oh, you know what really sparked World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, you would reasonably object. Well, that’s actually impossible because the Treaty of Versailles is five years too late to have been the spark. Well, the same thing is true here. When I see bias claim that Luther publishing a German language Bible in 1522 was the spark that caused the reformation in 1517, I have to raise the same objection. That doesn’t make sense. You’re off by five years.

So my point here again is not to nitpick. There’s actually plenty of deeper theological arguments and objections that we could be having about the claims he makes about justification, baptism, variety of other things. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I mentioned this just to say fining myself to his thesis and to his major points, particularly the ones in poll quotes. We find no fewer than four or five errors in a piece that is not even 2000 words long by a well-respected Calvinist popular evangelical leader. Now, I think that should completely undermine any pretense of credibility he has on this topic. If you were a prosecutor accusing someone of murder and in a few minutes of describing the case, you’d gotten four or five major details about the case demonstrably wrong. The logical conclusion is you’re not ready.

Whether you’re right or wrong about the merits, you are clearly not qualified to present that case. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Get your facts in order before you proceed. And I say that with love. I don’t think he’s being malicious. I think he’s grossly ignorant of even the basics of Catholic theology and what Catholics believe, but he’s using his misunderstanding about this to argue that we’re not Christians. And worse, there are plenty of other Protestants who know even less about Catholicism than bias does who read his peace and come away convinced, oh yeah, I guess Catholics aren’t Christians. And so when we confront these kind of things over and over and over again, I’m using this example, there’s so many others I could use. Our role is to gently correct these errors. People aren’t believing these things to be wrong on purpose. No one wants to get this many things wrong in this short of a span of time.

That’s embarrassing. The point is people are innocently falling into error after error after error. Now, maybe they should be doing more research. Maybe they shouldn’t just be reading other Protestant sources to learn about Catholicism. That’s fine. Bis at least tries to read the catechism. Although he doesn’t get to all the parts he should have, fine, there’s clearly at least a good faith effort. My point is not to criticize his effort or his intentions. My point is to highlight there are mistakes and the arguing Catholics aren’t Christians almost invariably don’t understand what Catholics actually believe in the first place, and if we really did believe the things they thought we did, we would probably think we weren’t Christians too. And so our duty and really our opportunity is to set the record straight, but to do it gently and lovingly. So I hope I’ve done that.

That then leads to the third and final thing that we should do, and this is a big one to try to highlight the logical absurdities. Now, as I say this, I want you to remember an earlier distinction. The question here is not, do you disagree with the Catholic church’s position on X? The question here is why should we believe that anyone who believes the Catholic teaching on X isn’t a Christian, or to put it another way, why should we believe that we have to agree with your interpretation of scripture on these doctrines, and this is your opportunity as a Catholic to broaden the lens and pull people out of their fixation a bit. Now, I’m going to take the doctrine of justification as an example because as I say, this is the number one reason that people tend to think we’re not Christians because we don’t agree with them on justification.

There’s a common way the debate on justification gets framed in these contexts. I think it’s very unhelpful most of the time and that way it goes something like this. Do I think St. Paul’s teaching on justification when he writes these words to the Romans and the Galatians? Does he mean it the way Catholics understand him or does he mean it the way Protestants understand him and the Catholic says, oh, it’s the Catholic interpretation, and the Protestant says, oh, it’s the Protestant interpretation. Okay, that’s fine. I don’t think that usually is going to result in any kind of productive conversation. Now, sometimes if you’ve got a great debater and someone else is not, but there’s a couple problems with this framing. Number one, neither side is likely to win For a simple fact. We have plenty of Catholic theologians and plenty of Protestant theologians, and many of them are very, very bright and spend a lot of time reading scripture and are absolutely convinced it says either the Catholic interpretation or the Protestant one.

So at least at the outset we can say, okay, it seems like people can reasonably read St. Paul come to two possible conclusions about what he’s saying. One of them is obviously wrong but not wrong in such an obvious way that they recognize their wrongness even after hours and hours of research and preparation and hearing the arguments on the other side and so on. So that’s the first problem. If you frame the debate in just what do we think St. Paul is saying, then clearly Catholics and Protestants can make a case that is convincing at least to themselves because they’ve done so. The second problem is a little subtler. It’s too narrow of a frame. It keeps people in their fixation, right? This is what I talked about before because whether your Protestant opponent realizes it or not, what they’re actually saying is something much bigger than a claim about justification.

They’re also making a claim about church history, an area that many Protestants haven’t given a lot of thought to putting it very simply, they’re making the claim not only that Protestants are right about justification, and Protestants are right about how to interpret Paul, but also that therefore there was no church on earth for 1500 years. Now, specifically here, remember I’m talking about people who say you have to agree with them on justification to be Christian. Here’s the problem. The basic case works like this, and I’m using justification here, but you can imply this in other contexts as well. The Catholic view on justification is undoubtedly the historic view for the nearly 1500 year period between the time of the apostles and the reformation. People believed what the Catholic church believed about justification, rightly or wrongly, they objectively did. Though if you’re going to say that that view is wrong and heretical and renders you not a Christian, then you have to chop down the tree of Christianity very near its trunk. That is something many Protestants have not grappled with the implications of doing. You can’t just say the institutional church went wrong sometime in the Middle Ages, you have to say, every known body of Christians for nearly 1500 years was apostate or at least heretical and didn’t deserve the name of Christian.

That’s the case. I will make that case with some detail here on the topic of justification because for many people, maybe this history isn’t known, but this is something that you should know about. But again, I would say that you can make the same argument maybe having to do a little bit of research on any number of other issues that people say, we’re not Christians because we believe X, Y, Z, and it turns out we believe that thing Christians have always believed and they believe some newfangled thing, newfangled maybe 500 years old, but still 75% of Christianity had already happened before it got to the reformation. So it’s still a radically novel kind of doctrine. So let’s talk about that with justification particularly, and I’ll leave it to you to kind of fill in the rest if you’re dealing with some other doctrine for this, I would turn to the Calvinist historian and theologian, Alice McGrath and his book, as the subtitle says, it’s a history of the Christian doctrine justification.

So he’s exactly looking at this question, what did people historically believe about justification? And now bear in mind, McGrath as a Protestant agrees with the Protestant view of justification, and he actually explicitly goes looking for forerunners of what he calls the reformation view and cannot find them. He says that the essential features of the Reformation doctrines of justification is that there’s this systematic and deliberate distinction between justification and sanctification put in plain language. Justification and sanctification are treated as two separate things and they work differently. Our works are relevant to sanctification. Our works are not relevant to justification, so they’re clearly two separate things. They might coexist in a believer, but they’re two very clearly distinguished things. But this distinction he realizes upon researching is actually new to the reformation that earlier Christians hadn’t read St. Paul’s treatment of justification and sanctification as meaning these two radically distinct things.

In his words, a fundamental discontinuity was introduced into the Western theological tradition where none had ever existed or been contemplated. This is not some continuity with the past. This is a radical disjuncture, right? The reformation understanding of the nature of justification as he puts it, must therefore be regarded as a genuine theological novum. Okay? Lemme put that in plain language. It’s not just that we disagree in the mode of justification. Are we justified by faith alone or by faith in charity? It’s also that we disagree even on what the nature of what does it even mean to be justified in the first place? Is it about being made righteous or just declared righteous? Now, the reformer said it’s just about being declared righteous, but as McGrath quickly realizes, that is an absolute novo, a theological novelty in the 16th century. Nobody prior to that believed that nobody did.

Now, you can imagine, I mean to think about what a radical claim the reformers are making here, and everybody’s saying you have to agree with them to be a Christian. Imagine if I invented my own version of Christianity tomorrow, and then I said, not only am I still a true Christian despite my own version of Christianity that never existed before, but anyone who disagrees with my interpretation of Christianity can no longer be called a Christian. You’re not a Christian if you’re a Protestant, Catholic, whatever. You have to be a Joe White. I don’t know you would regard that claim as on its face farcical. I think to put it in a non-Christian context, if you’re familiar with the history of Islam, you’ve got the major split between Sunnis and Shia, but then you have these later kind of Islamic mystical movement called Sufism that is pretty different, and people debate whether it should even be considered part of Islam or a separate religion.

Imagine if Sufi said, Hey, even though we’re new on the scene, Catholics in Sunnis and Shiites don’t get to be counted as Muslims. We’re the only real Muslims and everybody else. You don’t have to be a Muslim even to realize that’s a ridiculous claim. Likewise, Protestants who believe in Sofie claiming anyone else isn’t Christian because they don’t agree with Sofie is equally farcical, and you don’t have to be Christian to recognize it. You can just recognize historically, IDE wasn’t a thing anybody believed in, not in the way the reformers mean it, right? Not in this forensic justification. All of the stuff that goes into the Protestant view, it doesn’t exist as a doctrine prior to the Reformation and honest Protestant historians admit this.

Now, some people hearing this, some Protestant listeners especially are going to be thinking, well, surely the church fathers must’ve gotten it right? Wasn’t just this a case of the Catholic church going wrong in the Middle Ages? Maybe when McGrath talks about all this theological nova, he just means a return to the tradition, right? Because then there’s a number of Protestants out there claiming this kind of thing right now that the Reformation was really a return to early Christianity rather than a new version of Christianity with novel doctrines. But the thing is, it’s just not true. McGrath looks particularly at the first 350 years of Christianity, and he’s quite explicit, he says, in that first 350 year period of Christianity, I would put it this way, Christians weren’t fixated on justification. He would say something much stronger. He would accuse their theology on justification of being in coha and Ill-defined.

He’s clearly frustrated that they’re not fixated on justification, and it’s not just that they’re not fixated on it. When they do talk about it, they clearly don’t hold the Protestant view on it. He goes so far as to saying that their view appears to be characterized by a works righteousness approach to justification. He’s clear, they’re not full on politicians, but they’re also clearly not Protestants on this question. So the logical conclusion here is pretty simple. If to be a Christian, we have to agree with your interpretation of justification as a Protestant. Then the early Christians, the very ones who preserve Christianity, even at the cost of their own life amidst persecution, the early Christians who preserved the books of the New Testament and told us which writings were Orthodox, were apostolic and we’re worthy of being canonical. The ones without whom we would not know which books did and didn’t belong in the New Testament, the ones who helped define the doctrines of the Trinity and Christology, the natures of Christ, all this stuff, those guys we have to say weren’t even Christian in the first place.

It doesn’t take a lot of theological imagination to realize that is a bigger problem than for just Catholics. If you seriously believe, you have to say as a Protestant, you can’t trust that we got the New Testament, right? We got the Trinity, right? We got Christology, right? Because why in the world would you put your Bible, your Trinitarian theology or your Christology in the hands of people you don’t even think are Christian in the first place? Just follow your own argument to its logical conclusion, and you see it totally undermines Christianity itself because you have to just say, Christianity was bye-bye in the first 350 years. We just don’t even find it. Not that people believed in justification of faith alone and then in error crept in. They never believed in it in the first place. And this by the way, this includes everybody. This includes even people like St.

Augustine. I mentioned him because John Calvin quotes Augustine over a hundred times and institutes of the Christian religion, many Calvinists love their idea of St. Augustine, but McGrath acknowledges Calvin and Augustine don’t even agree on what justification is. They don’t agree on whether it’s about being declared righteous or made righteous. Now, McGrath argues that Augustine’s view on this subject is actually unacceptable because he thinks it’s not like an accurate understanding of the underlying Hebrew. Now, I think he’s wrong on that. We don’t have to get into the merits of the justification debate. My point is just everybody is off the table, including Augustine and McGrath is by no means the first Protestant theologian or historian to point this out. You go back to Philip Schaaf in the 19th century and he makes this point. He’s looking at the claim ascribed to Luther, probably not actually said by Luther.

That justification is the article by which the church stands or falls, right? Justification is the thing that is the make or break issue for whether you’re a Christian. That’s what it means. In other words, this makes it a church or not a church. That’s the idea. And Scheff is like, well, looking at the first a hundred years of Christianity, if anyone expects to find in this period or any of the church fathers, Augustine himself not accepted the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, he will be greatly disappointed. It just doesn’t exist. Now, you’ll find people who reject Shae and reject Alistair McGrath and say, oh, well maybe this individual Christian over here believed in justification by faith alone, I don’t think that is credible or accurate, but we don’t even have to get into the debate on that because again, remember that second important distinction I mentioned before that it’s not just a distinction between I think the church is wrong to you’re therefore not a Christian.

It’s also the distinction between individuals whether they’re going to heaven or hell. And the second question about the church, is there a body alesia, an assembly of Christians, an identifiable visible body in any way, shape or form, however you understand the word church. Is there a visible church anywhere prior to the reformation that believes in justification by faith alone or anything resembling it? And the answer is resoundingly and very clearly? No, there is not. Now that then leaves us with three possible conclusions. Number one, the Catholic Protestant dispute on justification isn’t really a case of us having two different gospels that Protestants who say we disappeared justification. So you’re not a Christian, are using St. Paul’s warnings about a different gospel out of context. They’re misunderstanding what he’s saying in Galatians. That’s not what he’s talking about. That’s the first possibility, and that’s what I think is actually true.

The second possibility though is that this is a case of two different gospels, a true gospel and a false gospel. But you then have to say, even if you’re a Protestant, well, the Protestant one is about 1500 years late to the party. Now, if you are saying this is two different gospels and your gospel is 1500 years late to the party, that is a huge problem. Why is that a huge problem? Well, partly just obviously, right? If you’re claiming this is what Christians were supposed to believe the whole time, how did no one know that until the reformation? But also this automatically disqualifies the Protestant view because the Christian standard that we should all believe in is that we are to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. That’s Jude one, three, that we’re not looking for some new different gospel.

We’re looking to hold on to what Christians have always believed. That’s our mandate. And in fact, we’re warned against anyone coming along with some new gospel in two Timothy St. Paul warns that the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, turning away from listening to the truth. That’s what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to believe any new gospel that we can’t show us around for 2000 years. Why? Because we’re explicitly warned that that is not the truth. So if you believe St. Paul is inspired by the Holy Spirit to write those words to say, watch out for anybody presenting some new gospel, and then you say, yeah, sure, this wasn’t believed for 1500 years, but this is what we were supposed to believe. All along you’ve highlighted to yourself as teaching the very thing that St.

Paul told us to reject. So notice what we’ve done here. We’ve looked not just at the os sensible claim about justification, but about the implications of it by looking at what this means for church history, because this is something most Protestants just don’t think deeply about. It’s not just a question of how do I personally read my Bible and how do you personally read your Bible? It’s a question of if you believe something about the Bible is the gospel, then everyone has believe it and that thing wasn’t believed for most or all of church history. That’s a really radical and unsupportable kind of claim.

So either this means, as I say, this isn’t really the make or break issue that these kind of Protestants say it is. So we can disagree on Sofie and still regard one another as Christians, or this really is two different gospels, but you are the late comers to the party and we shouldn’t regard you as Christians. Those are the two possibilities. But either way, we should hopefully see that it’s quite clear that if you’re pedaling a new version of the gospel, even a new version you think should have been the old version, fine, still a new version of the gospel. It’s absurd for you to insist that those who believe in the faith delivered once for all to the apostles are wrong for holding onto what they’ve always believed. For all those reasons and many, many more, I would say if you’re a Protestant wondering if Catholics are Christians, you can put your mind at ease and you should instead be wondering if your own theology held up to those same standards of is this a faith delivered once for all to the apostles for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.