Why Head Coverings blind Protestants.

I think I've formulated a new apologetics argument that should prove fun and (hopefully) fruitful when talking with Protestants. Basically, the way Protestants view the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist is similar to how Paul describes the reason for Head Coverings in 1 Corinthians 11. The result of this line of thinking would not only force Protestants to make Baptism indistinguishable from Eucharist, but also to 'raise' Head Coverings up to the level of a new Sacrament in itself. Let's see where this goes. 

As (Not So) Often As You Do This - another round of the crushing Protestant liturgical dilemma

Though I haven't had much time to blog recently, I wanted to show people a beautiful real-life example of the crushing effectiveness of the Ultimate Catholic Apologetics Argument (UCAA) against Protestants (which I posted about previously). 

A "Reformed Baptist" pastor named Ken at the Protestant apologetics site Beggars All had a post focused on criticizing Catholics for following "traditions of men" rather than the Bible, which turned out to be highly ironic shortly after I brought up the UCAA in the combox. There's no need to read the post or most of the comments, but if you're interested just see the last ten comments or so for how effortlessly the UCAA can take down the most committed "Bible Christian" (see THIS link to take you straight to the last few comments). 

The key post is when I responded to Ken saying, 

[Pastor Ken said]: None of what you say really carries any weight with me, since you are right in the sense that that an order of worship is not laid out word for word, but the general idea is for us to worship God by Scripture, prayer, singing, teaching, etc. and we can arrange the order however we want to and that is not a big deal to me.

[Nick's response]: The main problem I have here is that you haven't actually given any Scriptural verses that say what the "general idea" is for Christian Liturgy. The closest thing you've listed is the Lord's Supper, which you say you only do once a month. I don't even think you've given a verse that says singing is supposed to be done during liturgy.

As for your admission that you only celebrated the Lord's Supper once a month, this is astonishing because either it is part of liturgy or it isn't. If it is part of liturgy, you have no right to only do it 25% of the time. This suggests a person can celebrate the Lord's Supper as rarely as they feel like it, and by extension they can leave out Scripture, prayer, etc, as often as they feel like it. All this reduces down to a liturgical relativism, which really isn't liturgy at all, but more and more a man-made event according to personal taste.

As you can see, Ken was pretty trapped here, because while the Bible does indicate the Eucharist is the essential part of the liturgy, and thus is done "often" (1 Cor 11:26), both Ken and most Evangelicals do not do this that often. And as I also point out, to compound the dilemma they are in, that line of thinking means there is nothing actually essential to the Christian Liturgy, which is ridiculous, and results in the Protestant being able to leave out anything they want on any given Sunday.

Now, it's important to note that while this massive problem didn't bother Ken nor will it trouble most other Protestants, the fact is it should, and I believe that it eventually will bother them. For now, it's great that some seeds were planted. I strongly believe that if more Catholics would start using the UCAA, I swear that this will be the downfall of Westminster Seminary in a few short years.

The ultimate and most effective Catholic apologetics argument against Protestantism.

I have come to the conclusion that the most powerful apologetics argument that a Catholic can make against Protestantism is that their Sunday Liturgy is actually man-made and thus blatant idolatry. Let me explain this more.

The most important duty a human has, regardless even of whether they are a Christian or not, is to worship God. This should be - without a doubt - an obvious truth that everyone can agree upon. Given this, a person must not only worship God, they must do so properly, i.e., they must worship as God has instructed them to do. This means that Liturgy requires divine revelation, because otherwise the person is "worshiping" God based on what sounds good to their human mind...but there is a word for worshiping according to what sounds good to you: it's called idolatry. So the only way to escape idolatry is to worship according to how God has divinely revealed it. Which leads us to the key problem which all Protestants face.

Problems with the Reformed view of Federal Headship and problems with the Reformed view of Liturgy.

I have two new guest posts up at [old deleted blog]. Since the blog was deleted I will have to post them here: 

THE REFORMED DOCTRINE OF FEDERAL HEADSHIP:
The Reformed notion of Federal Headship states that all of mankind lives under the representative umbrella of a father figure, namely Adam or Jesus. They say the reason why God can consider all men subject to the consequences of Adam’s deliberate sin, even though we didn’t personally sin, is because God judges us ‘in Adam’. Likewise, when a person is saved, the Reformed say that person is worthy of the blessings of salvation, not for anything they did, but because of the perfect obedience of Christ, with God judging them to be ‘in Christ’. To put it crudely, it’s as if all mankind were placed in one of two boxes, one labeled “Adam”, the other labeled “Jesus”. God doesn’t judge you personally, only by proxy, only based upon the box you’re in.

With that imagery in mind, popularly termed “Imputation,” it can be easily seen why Protestants believe salvation cannot be lost and why they shudder to hear Catholics teaching that our works play a role in our salvation: If we are ‘covered up’ (hidden) in the box labeled “Jesus,” and that’s all God judges us worthy of heaven or hell based upon, then obviously God wont be judging us based on our personal sins (causing us to deserve hell) or on our person good works (causing us to deserve heaven). This is what Protestants mean by “Christ Alone” and “Grace Alone”.

But if this Federalism/Imputation framework is true, then why does the Bible frequently speak of our personal sins being forgiven and our personal sins being the basis of our damnation? Why is God concerned about our personal failings if He is judging us solely based on the failings of Adam? If we are in the box labeled “Adam,” and that’s all God looks at, why does God care or judge us according to the box of our own sins? The only answer I can envision is that Federalism/Imputation must wrong (or only half-true). It is wholly inconsistent and even equivocal for a Protestant to say Jesus as Federal Head represents the believer entirely but Adam as Federal Head represents us only partially. Just as “Jesus plus our works” is anathema to Protestant ears, by the same logic, so must “Adam plus our works” must be rejected…and yet the latter is contrary to Scripture’s frequent claims of our personal sins being the object of God’s wrath and forgiveness (Romans 1-3).

This is not to say that Adam and Jesus are not ‘heads of humanity’ in a real and crucial sense, because Catholicism certainly believes they are heads. The point is that it cannot be Sola Headship as the Reformed teach, but rather (somehow) a combination of headship and our personal living.

REFORMED APPROACH TO LITURGY:

Is a Christian free to worship God however he pleases? I think all of us would intuitively answer “No” to that question. Man’s duty to worship God is too important to just be a free-for-all. This is especially true for Christians who have God’s Revelation, particularly the Bible. The Confessional Reformed tradition (rightly) understands that man is not only not free to worship however he pleases (since this would ultimately tend towards man worshipping himself), but in fact man should not worship in any way not clearly laid out in God’s Word. This notion is known in the Reformed tradition as the “Regulative Principle of Worship” (RPW), wherein man must worship God how God has revealed He wants to be worshiped. The goal of this post is to show that while the RPW sounds good on the surface, I think it quickly runs into some serious problems.

Most non-Reformed Protestant traditions (especially Evangelicalism) take a more ‘lax’ approach to Christian worship, generally holding to the idea that many forms of worship are acceptable so long as they don’t contradict Scripture. That view doesn’t see the Bible as prescribing a specific form of worship, but rather only ‘ruling out’ unacceptable practices (e.g. the use of images). Clearly, the ‘worship question’ is not trivial, yet Sola Scriptura has led to a more relativistic, human-centered approach to Christian worship, as each believer is seen as autonomous, not having to be subject to any specific pastor/congregation and having the ‘right’ to worship however he pleases (including simply sleeping in on Sunday). Rather than go on a tangent about Sola Scriptura in general though, I think the Confessional Reformed RPW view should be analyzed in light of what Scripture says, because it seems to me the RPW has little to no Scriptural support – which is quite ironic.

The most obvious starting point in discerning whether the RPW is actually Biblical is to find whether Scripture lays out any specific example of Christian liturgy. Some Evangelicals will say they base their Christian liturgy off of “The Acts 2 Church,” but at that point in the Church (Acts 2:42-47) there wasn’t even a book of the New Testament written yet, so “The Acts 2 Church” couldn’t even have been a Sola Scriptura based Christian liturgy. Moreover, there aren’t really any details here or anywhere else in Scripture of what precisely early Christian liturgy looked like. (Such information comes mostly from inspired Apostolic oral teaching, which Protestants reject.) So given this lack of specific Biblical testimony, from what I’ve been able to gather, the RPW is really a bunch of verses strung together to ‘form a principle’ (hence the name RPW), which ironically leads Reformed liturgy becoming more a work of men than a command of God.

To see this problem more clearly, consider John Calvin’s official liturgy which he instituted in Geneva in 1542 [1]: The liturgy begins with Confessing Sins, Prayer for Pardon [2], then goes on to Scripture Readings [3], a Sermon, a Collection of Alms, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, Words of Institution, Consecration of the Bread and Wine, and concludes with the Aaronic Blessing (Num 6:22-27). Now we can all agree that none of this is necessarily a bad thing when considered individually. The problem is that this “liturgy” is nowhere instituted in the Bible. Is man really free to just lift the Aaronic Blessing from the OT and append it to the Christian Liturgy and call this approved by God? Not if they are being honest. And as anyone can see, a whole host of liturgies can be invented using this cut-and-paste method. [4] This is clearly an unacceptable position for a Christian to take.

Given this brief look at Reformed Liturgy, it seems to me that the RPW not only is self-refuting (since it’s not a specific principle taught in Scripture, just a gathering of verses here and there), it also exposes one more flaw in Sola Scriptura, since it makes liturgy more or less relative to the whims of the individual (guided at most by some generic ‘principles’). So while it is good that the Reformed take worship of God seriously, they unfortunately find themselves in a conundrum wherein as hard as they try to “worship God as He has commanded in His Word,” they end up worshiping God according to blatant traditions of men. Only an appeal to inspired Apostolic oral teaching and Apostolic Succession (both of which Catholicism has) can ground a Christian in true worship and prevent a slide into man-centered relativistic “worship”.

 

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulative_principle_of_worship#John_Calvin.27s_Liturgy

[2] It’s not clear to me how the Confession of Sins and Prayer for Pardon is compatible with the Reformed idea that man’s sins are completely forgiven at the moment of Justification and that God only views man in light of the Righteousness of Christ imputed to him. Why ask for forgiveness of sins every Sunday if you believe all your sins were already forgiven and that God never counts your sins against you?

[3] It’s also not clear to me if the Scripture reading is taken from a fixed lectionary of readings (if so, where did the Bible teach this?), or if the Scripture reading is a randomly chosen text (and if so, where does the Bible say we worship God by randomly selecting which texts we feel like reading?).

[4] Note that in the Wiki link above, Calvin had noticeably modified this 1542 liturgy from his 1540 liturgy, including removing Psalm 124:8 from the start, removing the recitation of the Ten Commandments (with each Commandment followed by Kyrie Eleison) and removing the Nunc Dimittis before the conclusion. Did the Bible tell him he could make such revisions? Does he not realize a whole host of liturgies can come about by this mixing/cutting/pasting?

Roamin' Catholicism (Roaming - Part 2)

Having established the foundation in Part 1, I'm now going to focus specifically on Catholicism. 

I would argue that one of the most fundamental problems in the Church today is taking place at the parish level, where the problem of "roaming" is rampant. The bishops need to put the breaks on this by setting a good example and by warning the faithful of the negative effects of this mindset. 

Why is "Mercy Seat" mentioned in Romans 3:25? (More Problems with Penal Substitution)

I've been wanting to write about Romans 3:25 for a year or two now, but I never got around to it. I think it actually contains an interesting nugget that strongly goes against Penal Substitution, so it's definitely worth exploring. What recently got my interest was that a Calvinist lady I was talking to online had kept bringing up Romans 3:25 and I just found out another Calvinist that often posts here has written up his own article on Romans 3:25 in support of Penal Substitution. So I take this as a sign that I need to talk about it too! 

St Cyril of Jerusalem gives an example of Tradition (Were the Early Church Fathers Protestant?)

Often times Protestants ask Catholics to "define Tradition," expecting to find some long drawn out list of teachings that weren't written down in Scripture. The problem is, that's not how Tradition is understood. Rather, a better understanding of Tradition is the Church's Liturgical life, seeing the oral tradition expressed in ancient prayers of the Mass. A good example of this can be seen in St Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures.