Purify Your Bride

The classic reason why a protestant rejects the Catholic church is because many Catholic doctrines are just unbiblical. When you point out that the church claims all it’s doctrines are in harmony with the scriptures there is a dismissive response. Whatever. Still most of those same protestants believe that there is no contradiction within scripture. What do they mean when they say that? Most would not be surprised at all to learn somebody has written a book called “100 Biblical Contradictions”. They know if you go at the bible looking for contradictions you will find quite a few. Certainly if you point out to them that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 give different creation stories and therefore declare that the bible can’t be the word of God they won’t be impressed by the argument. They might point out that since the time of Moses people have been well aware of the existence of 2 creation stories in the book of Genesis and have accepted it as God’s word anyway. The bible needs to be read in the right way in order to eliminate apparent contradictions and determine what God is trying to tell us. If you approach the bible determined to read it in the wrong way you won’t get far. You need faith.

So when you look at the Catholic view of scripture, tradition, and the magesterium you get the same thing. You can find apparent contradictions like ‘call no man father” or “all have sinned”. They are no different that the contradictions that are all over scripture. They don’t disqualify it as being the word of God any more than 2 creation stories disqualifies Genesis. Just like many rational people accept Genesis as God’s word so to many rational people have accepted Catholic tradition as God’s word. That means it is possible to put it together without ending up in a mass of contradictions. So the dismissive response is totally out of order just like the atheist dismissing Genesis is out of order.

When you wrap your mind around what it means that many people have embraced scripture, tradition, and the magesterium as the word of God so many objections get overruled. In order to say you can’t believe that and have a healthy faith life you need to find a flaw in those people who did believe it. Are they biblically ignorant? Are they incapable of finding the contradictions that are there? Do they fail to pray for guidance? The problem is there are so many saints in Catholic history it becomes impossible to make any reason fit. If St Thomas Aquinas found Catholicism to be reasonable who are you to declare it unreasonable. If you dig into who St Thomas was you will find that hard to maintain. But he is not alone. There are hundreds of Catholics who are just unassailable in their faith walk. So being a good christian in every sense of the word is not incompatible with accepting Catholic doctrine.

So the real problem is not that Christianity is inconsistent with Catholic doctrine but that certain individuals decide their faith is not compatible with Catholic teaching. It is not a general problem but a personal problem. Once you get to that point then you have a harder time justifying the disunity protestantism has caused. If the doctrinal show stopper to unity is not a matter of principle but a matter of taste then it is just selfishness for me to worsen the break in the body of Christ. If I only live separate from the body because I find obeying hard but I cannot say it is inconsistent with a strong relationship with Jesus then I should “make every effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace”(Eph. 4:3).