As someone who has been “there and back again” on this divide (and there are few of us who have made that journey) I think I could add something to the discussion, so here goes:
In the first chapter, “How are we Saved?” Maloney points out significant differences in how Protestants and Roman Catholics see human will, God’s grace, faith, justification, and the role of good works. Is unregenerate man free to cooperate with God’s grace, or is his will bound to the point that he is “dead in his sins”?
The one thing I have come to find distasteful in Roman Catholicism is their concept of merit, which is linked in turn to how much time they anticipate spending in purgatory. Jesus Christ’s merit–irrespective of how that’s dispensed, which is a separate question–is sufficient, the hard part is getting people to come to a place where it is applied to them. After all, if grace isn’t free, it isn’t grace, is it?
On the other hand, Protestants–and yes, I’m looking at you, Reformed types–have obscured the issue by insisting that we start out totally depraved, which is why we cannot reach heaven. You don’t need to be totally depraved to miss heaven. To put it in a mathematical example, if you start at zero and the goal is 100 you’ll never make it if you stay at zero, but you won’t make it either if you only get to 99, or 99.9, or 99.99…if God’s uncreated goodness is not in you, then you won’t make no matter how close you get or how close you think you get.
Similarly, the second chapter, “How Does God Speak to Us?” points to differences in how Protestants and Roman Catholics view the relationship between the authority of the Bible and the authority of the Church. This is the point I typically focus on when asked the difference between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. The way I typically explain it, all other differences are downstream from the most fundamental issue of authority. Are the Holy Scriptures sufficient for Christians on matters of faith and morals, or is the Church’s teaching authority on the same level as Scripture? Is the Bible knowable by Christians, or must the Church authorities provide a definitive and infallible interpretation of the Bible? Does the Bible have authority over the Church, or are they parallel sources of authority?
The issue of authority is an obsession in Christianity these days, and this blog has been dealing with it for a long time with posts like Authority and Evangelical Churches and We May Not Be a Church After All. The reviewer muddies the water on whether Scripture and tradition are different sources of authority or one in the same. Traditionally Roman Catholicism has regarded Scripture and tradition as a unity which cannot contradict each other; the serious issue is whether the Roman Catholic Church has botched the job by allowing the latter to deviate from the former (whose canon is set in place.) As I noted in Some Thoughts on Bossuet’s History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches:
The Variations were Bossuet’s efforts to show the serious problems inherent in the Reformed churches. So how successful was he? Part of how successful he seems depends upon how you accept his view of Roman Catholicism. A Roman Catholicism which is more like Bossuet envisions it–conscious of Scripture, independent of the state, Augustinian in theology–would be a better entity to adhere to than the one that he had then and we have now. A big part of the problem is that the reverends pères jesuites, or at least one in particular (Pope Francis,) are once again propagating their morale accommodante, as they did in Bossuet’s France (much to its long-term detriment.) Unfortunately then and now the situation is more complicated, but Bossuet tends to ignore this.
We now turn to the third part:
The third chapter, “Who Runs the Church?” is mostly about the office of the Papacy. Again, there is little in this chapter with which a well-catechized Anglican would disagree. We would agree with Maloney that our church leaders have a limited authority that is subject to the Scriptures. His definition of priest, however, is limited to an Old Testament sacrificial priesthood which stand as a mediator between God and the people (54). As such he rejects any idea of priesthood for Protestant clergy, despite acknowledging that only “most” Protestants agree with this rejection (53). Again, Anglicans who accept the Formularies as our “confessional” authority would disagree with his definition.
The problems with Roman Catholicism’s wholesale importation of the Old Testament’s concept of priesthood are numerous, not the least of which is that it detracts from the unique nature of Christ’s own priesthood. This is an issue I discuss in Why I Don’t Agree With the Concept of the “Sacrifice of the Mass”.
The final chapter, “How Should Christians Worship God?” is more problematic from an Anglican perspective. Not only does Maloney (rightly) contrast Roman Catholic and Protestant definitions and understandings of the Sacraments, but he also paints a contrast between Roman Catholic and Protestant worship. He claims that Roman Catholic worship is centered on the Eucharist, while Protestant worship is centered on the proclamation and preaching of the Scriptures.
Roman Catholicism has been successful in bringing the war on the topic to the Anglican home front rather than the other way around, as is evidenced by the “communion every Sunday” reality of the 1979 BCP TEC and the endurance of Anglo-Catholicism, and it’s spreading elsewhere too. Until an effective counter to this is sent to the battlefield this situation will continue.
The reviewer asks the question, “So, in the end, is What still Divides Us a useful book in an Anglican context?” Much of this post is a review of what I’ve written on this topic before, and I would round this out with another reflection from Book Review: Trevor Gervase Jalland’s The Church and the Papacy:
Jalland was unsure of where all of this was going, both for the Roman Catholics and for everyone else. Three quarters of a century after Jalland gave these lectures, we really don’t have a clearer picture. Vatican II had a great deal of promise but its own mandate for change was at once too broad and too narrow, and worse it became the tool of those with a sub-Christian agenda. The current Occupant of the See of Peter, back to the usual agenda of protecting the Vatican’s turf, currying favor with the “gods of this world” and using the authority of an infallible successor to Peter to make this happen, has left many inside and outside the Church in the lurch. As for the Protestant world, the Main Line churches, descendants (in the US) for the most part of the state churches (in Europe) that emerged from the Reformation, have lost center stage to the Evangelicals and Pentecostals, whose propensity to splinter makes putting the pieces back together difficult just by the sheer number of the pieces themselves.
What Christianity needs is leadership which is committed to transmitting the paradosis of the Apostles without expanding it.
Some of you may ask the question, “If all of this is true, why did you swim the Tiber?” The answer is simple: Roman Catholicism has many constants, but is also subject to upheavals and changes, and few match the situation in the two decades after Vatican II, when I was Roman Catholic. Although the Trads concentrate on attacking the “sub-Christian agenda” of some in the wake of that council, there were others–including my first parish priest–who were having serious doubts about the way Roman Catholicism was leading its flock and seldom seeing the transformational power that the New Testament speaks of in the faithful. The desire to see that was a motivation behind, among other things, the Charismatic Renewal, and the fact that it got bogged down in authority issues was and is a tragedy. With Paul VI’s death and John Paul II’s accession in 1978, the push to revert to the “old ways” in a post-Vatican II context ended much of that experimentation.
I consider myself blessed that I experienced what I did, and, as I noted here, its failure still hurts.
Positive Infinity 