One of the benefits of being retired from ordained ministry is that I no longer have to worry about how my own personal thoughts and opinions affect the people I’m called to serve. If I offend, in other words, that’s solely on me and doesn’t compromise my effectiveness as a pastor. I don’t even have to worry about getting fired!
It’s also given me time to reflect more thoughtfully on what it has meant to be a Protestant (as opposed to some other kind of Christian).
Back when I was pursuing ordination, I had to write a paper that summarized my reasons for choosing ordination in the United Church of Christ (U.C.C.), including my understanding of its polity, i.e., its organizational structure.
I recall making the point that Protestantism, of which the U.C.C. is a part, demands a lot from its adherents, in contrast to that of the more hierarchical structure of, say, Catholicism, which in theory involves less input from laypeople than the more democratically run U.C.C.
The Reformation, after all, loudly insisted that laypeople were entitled to not only read the Bible (something actively forbidden by the Catholic Church of the day) but, for better or worse, to interpret it for themselves. If taken seriously, this requires both intentionality and effort.
In studied contrast, Roman Catholic priests of the day were tasked with performing virtually all the heavy theological lifting, while the faithful, again for better or worse, logically deferred to their authority.
However, after serving a number of mainline Protestant churches over the years, I’ve observed a curious irony. Contrary to Reformation logic, that is, most Protestant laypeople today look almost exclusively to the pastor to tell them what to believe!
I used to joke, in fact, that Protestants nowadays have become more Catholic than the Catholics! Meaning that most laypeople, with notable exceptions, don’t think it’s their job to delve into biblical or theological matters. That’s why they hire pastors!
So, while Protestants today still take immense pride in their “independence” (just ask them, they’ll tell you!), they actually possess very little in the way of independent thought. Unless, of course, they’re deciding which color the sanctuary carpet ought to be. Then all bets are off.
On a different but related topic, I often hear Protestant laypeople complain that any talk about sin is “too Catholic.” And yet, believe it or not, Reformation Protestants were far more preoccupied with the subject.
Specifically, the Catholic tradition maintains that sin only partially obscures the Imago Dei, or Image of God, conferred on all human beings at Creation.
Protestants, on the other hand, reject this. Instead, they argue that Original Sin completely blots out any vestige of the Image of God, thus rendering all humans subject to “total depravity.”
In practical terms, this means that Catholics can know something of the original divine goodness bestowed by God at Creation, whereas Protestants’ access to this same goodness must come solely from the salvific ministrations of Jesus Christ, i.e., from revelation (the Eternal breaking into time). For Catholics, revelation increases and perfects one’s knowledge of God; for Protestants, revelation is its sole source.
So, given this, why do so many modern-day Protestants tend to deny the significance, if not the very reality, of sin? Perhaps, I would suggest, it’s an overreaction to the Reformation’s perverse obsession with it.
In the immediate aftermath of the Reformation, things got ugly. Both sides withdrew into separate camps and hardened their positions, dashing any hope of compromise or conciliation.
Persecutions followed. While the Catholics were burning heretics at the stake (some for merely translating the Bible into their native languages), Protestants were busy searching out other kinds of heretics, often those thought to be unsaved and, thus, of the devil.
In his landmark 2019 book, Dominion, British author Tom Holland offers a novel (at least to me) explanation for John Calvin’s idea of “double predestination,” a concept I confess I’ve never quite grasped, much less accepted.
As the term implies, double predestination argues that some people are predestined to be saved while others are predestined to be damned. This fits within the overall Reformation framework that Original Sin had compromised the efficacy of human will.
It’s God’s actions that count, in other words, not our personal decisions. Salvation is not up to us; it’s up to God to decide who’s in and who’s not.
Holland’s fresh insight (again, for me) is that rather than merely characterizing Calvin as the harsh puritan we mostly imagine him to be, he actually was offering a rather humane solution to the regnant tendency within the church of his day to punish people for their lack of religiosity.
In short, rather than persecuting apostates or unbelievers, his argument was that God had already done the sorting. The Church’s focus, therefore, should be on molding those whom God already had chosen, rather than raging against those outside the fold.
Calvin’s community, therefore, while admittedly strict and demanding, imposed high expectations only on those already perceived to be predestined for heavenly things. This was, in a sense, an advancement beyond the overheated religious enthusiasms of his day.
One of the common mistakes of modern historicism is the tendency to hold the past to the standards and assumptions of today. In so doing, we often fail to recognize the inherent progress imbedded within the events themselves.
Take the Old Testament’s judicial concept of “an eye for an eye.” This, believe it or not, was an advancement over what preceded it. Which is to say, prior to this, if someone committed a crime, his whole family or tribe was punished (“blood liable”).
The updated “eye for an eye” standard meant that only the individual perpetrator of the crime was to be punished, not his or her whole clan. This was, as I say, progress. Yet today we mostly think of the idea as hopelessly barbaric, as revenge for revenge’s sake.
Along these same lines, our awareness of the often unfortunate struggles of the Reformation era seems to have led much of modern-day Protestantism to embrace an opposite, revisionist extreme: because we got carried away in the past, perhaps it’s best to ditch the whole thing altogether. Let’s just say there’s no such thing as sin,
The obvious problem with this is that sin is an undeniable fact of life. To ignore it is to ignore an essential aspect of human existence.
But how then should modern-day Protestants think about sin? It’s almost as if our only option today is to either revert to the harsh judgmentalism of Reformation Protestantism or deny sin altogether.
Here the middle ground would seem best. While it is undeniably true that sin has a debilitating effect on human flourishing, it is also true that constantly obsessing about it is equally problematic.
The older I get (and presumably the wiser), the more I have come to believe that there’s only so much we can do about sin. Which is to say, it has more power over us than we realize.
After all, the brokenness of sin goes beyond each of us personally. There’s corporate sin as well – that effectuated by humanity writ large. The effect of sin, therefore, both individual and corporate, is as pervasive as it is inescapable. Each of us, regardless of who we are, necessarily labors under its spell. It is, simply put, beyond our control.
Which is another way of saying we all need help.
Which is where divine mercy comes into play. We alone are powerless to fix ourselves, much less the world around us. Christian faith understands this and offers mercy, forgiveness, and grace. In addition, it reveals to us a new vision and a new hope, beyond the strained circumscription both from within and without. It also reminds us, perhaps especially, that even on the darkest of days, far above the passing clouds, stands the sun that shines ever brightly still.