The Protestant's Dilemma by Devin Rose Read Free Book Online

it, well, that’s a result of their corruption. Protestants have to give their churches only qualified or conditional assent, knowing that at any time they could leave to find one whose doctrines were less corrupted.
     
    BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,
    The Church is both a human institution and a supernatural society, with Christ at the head.
     
    Infallibility is a practical necessity for Christianity, because it safeguards the deposit of faith given by Christ to the apostles and first Christians. Imagine if God didn’t protect the Church from error: We would be left to our own devices to identify and preserve what Jesus taught. After 2,000 years of such fallible human activity, and the countless disagreements and divisions it inevitably produces, we could have little expectation that what was passed down to us was the pristine truth of divine revelation.
    A bald-faced appeal to the Holy Spirit’s help doesn’t solve the problem, either, since the way in which the Spirit works would have to be given. For Protestants, the Holy Spirit primarily works within individual Christians; but the ubiquitous fractures among them make it impossible to conclude that the Holy Spirit is leading all of them to truth. The Holy Spirit could work infallibly to guide someone into the full truth of revelation, but there’s no sure way for a Protestant to say where this has happened. What practical good is that guidance if we can’t identify it?
    Yet Protestants subconsciously realize the need for infallibility, through their recognition that, by inspiring fallible men to write the books of Scripture, God ensured that what was written was free from all error. Without that belief, it would make no sense to call Scripture the rule of faith for Christians, since it could present mere human ideas as divine truth. But they stop short of recognizing an infallible guide to interpreting Scripture—and so every fallible Protestant must do it himself as best as he is able, fashioning his own body of fallible doctrines to believe in.
    As I continued growing in my faith and sought to refute the wild Catholic claim of infallibility, I was still bothered by the lack of unity among Christians, which was clearly against Christ’s and Paul’s commands. I investigated where we got the books of the Bible and looked at moral issues such as contraception—which I had always assumed was a good thing—where the Catholic Church contrasted with Protestantism. I found reasonable answers to my old objections and challenged my Evangelical friends with them (my argument against contraception must have felt like a bolt of lightning out of the sky), and they failed to respond with convincing answers.
    I remember the day I could see that the Catholic Church’s claim of infallibility just might be true. It was similar to when I had been an atheist and one day realized that Jesus Christ might really be who he said he was . It was exhilarating! It meant that God had not left us alone to wallow in error. It also meant that I could actually become holy! Though “all” sinned and fell short of God’s glory, Jesus did not; this meant that we too could live in true freedom from the slavery of sin. Likewise, even though the Church is made up of sinful human beings, the Holy Spirit could make it not just infallible but also holy.
    As a Protestant I believed that God infallibly guided sinful men to write inerrant, divine truth: the Bible. It was only one step further also to believe that throughout time God continued to guide fallible men into all truth.
     
    THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA
    If Protestantism is true, then Christian churches are no more reliable than any other human institution. Any confidence we place in a set of doctrines, therefore, is shaky; we must always take a stand with one foot out the door. Without the assurance that God has preserved the deposit of faith from error and by his Spirit guided people in every age to defend that truth, we who live two