I promised you an overview of the Protestant criticisms for Catholicism. Sorry for the delay. In general both the strength and weakness of the Catholic approach is Tradition, i.e. confidence in the decision-making ability of the Church over time. This is a strength because it allows for reasonably certain conclusions to be drawn. The primary alternative sources of authority seem to be God and the Bible. Both result in endless arguments: everyone can claim that God has spoken to them, and the supposed messages vary greatly; similarly, what people claim the Bible says vary, so we get a warring collection of churches, each claiming to be Biblical. The problem I have as a Protestant is that it seems to me that Tradition has diverged from truth. In summary, I see Jesus as being largely anti-institutional and anti-tradition. His big enemies were the Pharisees, who had come up with interpretations of the Law that specified behavior in great detail. He opposed this sort of tradition. While Jesus' citations of the Bible sometimes look like fundamentalist proof-texting, he wasn't quite a fundamentalist. Mat 5 and 6 (the Sermon on the Mount) emphasize the spirit behind scripture, rather than the exact words. In Mat 19:8 says that one provision of the Law was given because people were unwilling to accept the truth -- this is a rather un-fundamentalist approach to Scripture, since it's effectively making one of the commands culturally relative. Yet overall, aside from his own special authority, he emphasized Scripture and opposed traditional interpretation and the equivalent of canon law. This sort of radicalism has a hard time surviving. Within a couple of centuries, we find the church recreating most of what Jesus disliked about the Pharisees: formal authoritative interpretations of the Bible and other elements of the faith, tight doctrinal standards, and a legalistic approach. These things continued growing over time. I don't claim that Protestants are immune to this. The next generation after Calvin created a Reformed scholasticism that missed much of the significance of Calvin's work, and modern American evangelicals clearly want to see the Bible as a source of law -- answers to everything from homosexuality to hair length. Of course the opposite is possible too. Christian history is full of people with a direct pipeline to God, who come up with ideas completely out of left field. Both Catholics and Protestants have had to fight with this problem. (Luther spoke of one of his opponents who had "swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all.") But we've generally been more successful with fighting idiosyncratic interpretation than creeping legalism, simply because of the inherent conservative nature of large religious organizations. I am convinced that the only sound approach is a mix of tradition, Scripture, and inspiration. Scripture plays an important role for several reasons. Most basically, it's a record of things that the church agrees are God's actions and teachings. As such, it provides protections against the problems in the other sources of authority (though it also needs them, as I'll comment in a minute). The tendency of tradition is to "domesticate" God -- to turn Christianity into a neat set of rules and doctrines. There is also a tendency to allow non-Christian ideas and customs to creep in. Scripture fights these problems by providing us with a standard that doesn't change, and which can be traced directly to God -- the "thus says the Lord" of the prophets, Jesus' own teachings, or actions of God in history that show his will. It's not a perfect antidote, because people can read what they want into Scripture. However there's a limit to how far that can go before it begins to become clear that what's happening is "eisegsis" rather than exegesis. Tradition is important in dealing with Scripture, because it provides some protection against idiosyncratic interpretation. Yet when tradition itself becomes the problem, Scripture must be allowed to act as a check on it. In fact I have serious problems with both current Protestant and Catholic approaches. Protestants often carry "sola scriptura" to the point where there's nothing to prevent idiosyncratic interpretation. So we have a zillion denominations with differing views (though to be fair, the doctrinal differences among those denominations aren't as serious as you might think -- different organizations don't necessarily reflect a significant difference. Differences often represent simply historical divergences -- Americans came from different European countries, and brought their home churches with them. They also often reflect simply differences in the way church administration is organized. Since Protestants don't in general have a goal of merging everything into one huge church, such differences in practice are not necessarily seen as a problem by Protestants). But Catholics reject in principle the use of Scripture as a control. Thus there's no check on the Pharisaic tendencies of interpretation and law. Nor is there a check on the tendency of "folk religion" to infiltrate the church. To me the existence of canon law and Mariology are clear demonstrations of the dangers of tradition without an authority like Scripture to keep it in check. (Yes, I realize that Scripture *can* be interpreted in ways consistent with some of the Marian ideas, but since even Catholic Biblical scholars now admit that these interpretations are implausible, I think it's clear what's going on.) There are in principle a number of different compromises one could make, all of which would allow for some role of tradition and Scripture. For myself, I believe Scripture is primary, and tradition provides a context in which to interpret Scripture. This is because I see the proper foundation of Christianity as revelation. And Scripture seems to be the only authoritative source of revelation. The problem with regarding tradition as a parallel source is that it isn't, properly speaking, a source of revelation at all. Tradition is simply inertia -- it's what was always believed. Thus it's a safeguard against going off half-cocked, but it can't be a source of anything. When people defend Mariology, papal authority, or any of the other Catholic ideas based on tradition, I have problems. Tradition simply tells us that these ideas have been held for a long time. The question is where the tradition came from in the first place. It seems to me that tradition has roughly speaking five sources: - scripture. I.e. tradition is often traditional interpretation of scripture - an "apostolic deposit" transmitted directly from person to person independently of scripture - private relevation - ideas coming in from the surrounding culture - reasonable deductions from things already present in tradition Of these things, I think only the first two are legitimate revealed authority. And frankly I'm sceptical about the idea of an apostolic deposit transmitted independently of Scripture. I'm particularly sceptical of ideas that didn't show up until centuries after Christ actually having been somehow secretly transmitted from bishop to bishop with no one knowing about it. And that's what you'd have to assume for most of the Marian ideas (except maybe perpetual virginity -- that showed up fairly early, though it showed up first in Gnostic sources. Given the Gnostic tendency to create mythology that makes me rather suspicious). In fact I think few Catholic historians actually claim that there was any significant secret teaching transmitted indepedently of scripture. So in general, I find that "tradition" tends to act as a way of escaping the question "just what evidence is there for this idea, anyway?" For me, the primary useful function of tradition is simply the conservative one: In order to avoid continuing wild-goose chases, we insist that Christian theology should build on the conclusions of past generations. That doesn't mean it can't reject them if there's good enough Scriptural evidence. But that evidence needs to be stronger and stronger the more universally an interpretation has been held. Anyway, to answer the initial question of what problem I see with Catholicism, it is that by not having any check on tradition, it has allowed all kinds of ideas to come in that don't belong to Christianity. I've already mentioned several: - canon law. I don't object to portions of it that regulate the structure of the church -- any organization has to have some sort of rules that define how it works. Rather, I'm opposed to marital and other moral regulations, which almost exactly parallel the sorts of "traditions of men" Jesus objected to - Mariology. I'm not interested in detailed arguments here. As far as I can see, this has no basis in fact, and is simply based on various mythological imports from Gnostic speculation and various pagan traditions - papal authority. I have no objection to having a single leader in the church. However the kind of doctrinal authority now claimed for him has no basis that I can see. It seems to me to have been disproven by the fact that the only explicitly infallible decisions (the Assumption of the BVM and the Immaculate Conception of the BVM) are pretty obviously ill-founded. I see much good in the Catholic Church. It has conserved much of Jesus' teaching, and has generally been a force for good. I have some arguments with a number of specific doctrines, but possibly no more than I would have with some of my Protestant friends. However I'd have a problem personally belonging, because the model of authority used makes it impossible to do anything about the problems. Within the Protestant church we can try to call people to account on the basis of Scripture. One of the basic principles of the Reformation is that the Church must be "sempre reformanda". That is, we understand that the pressures for orthodoxy and conformity will require continuing reformations. In the long run I believe this does work. We can see many Protestant groups abandoning untenable doctrines because of the influence of Scripture, and we can see overly stodgy groups being remade by the power of the Holy Spirit. The problem I'd have with the Catholic church is that the basic principles of the church reject the possibility of such change. Now the fact is that it still happens: Vatican 2 is surely a testimony to the fact that Scripture can affect even the Catholic Church. But as long as the Catholic church considers itself to be identical with the whole church, and denies the superiority of Scripture to tradition, I wouldn't want to be a member. ------------------ 1. That tradition in the church is superior to Scripture, because the church determined what is to go in Scripture and gave it its authority. This argument is a common one, but I find it quite problematical. It goes against all other ideas of authority. Obviously when any authoritative instructions arrive, the recipient has to judge whether they really came from an authoritative source. But that doesn't mean that they have no authority beyond the recipient. Otherwise children would be superior to their parents, because they have to judge whether commands really came from their parents or not. And the authority of the 10 Commandments would be Israel rather than God, because they had to decide whether Moses was telling the truth when he said they were from God. In fact, the authority of Scripture comes from God because it reports teachings and actions of God. Like an obedient child, the church receives them. The situation is complicated by the fact that there was some discussion about which documents should be included. But I don't see this as a serious issue. Doctrinal discussions primarily cite the Gospels and Paul. And they were agreed on from as far back as we know. When you look at the apocryphal gospels there's a very dramatic difference. I don't think there was much question which gospels actually had Jesus' teachings in them. I'm much less concerned about the letters. The ones that are most commonly cited are those about which there was not any uncertainty. If II Peter had been omitted, or the Shepherd of Hermas accepted, it's hard to believe that that would have made a big difference. The main point is to get reasonably good coverage of how Jesus' message was interpreted within the orthodox church during the apostolic generation. And I think that was done. We know less about the history of the OT. But Jesus quoted it as authoritative, so I'm willing to accept it on his authority. Again, I'm not overly concerned about the exact books that are in it. The heart of it for Jesus was the Law of Moses -- i.e. the account of God's actions during the formative period of Israel, and the Prophets. Other books such as Proverbs are interesting and helpful, but not critical one way or the other. In the discussions in the early church, it's clear they were talking about recognizing authority, not creating it. The question was, which books are truly apostolic, not which books do we want to make authoritative? 2. On divisions in the church One argument for Catholicism is that it's the only way to avoid disasterous divisions in the church. There's no question that having a single authoritative source of teaching avoids disagreements. Without such an authoritative interpreter, Protestants do indeed disagree. However it's not clear what this has to do with truth. Just as truth isn't decided by a majority vote, simply having one person or a hierarchy officially designated as infallible doesn't make him so. (Yes, I'm aware that the Catholic concept is a bit more complex than just papal infallibility. Papal infallibility is based on a more general concept of the magisterium.) As far as I can tell, the argument seems to be a deducation from one phrase in the Bible: "the gates of hell will not prevail against it [the church]" (Mat 16:18). The whole concept of the authority of the church seems to be a deduction the supposed fact that God won't allow his church to make any fatal errors. I'm always suspicious of deducing things from what we think God will or won't allow. The Jews were convinced that God wouldn't have a Son, and if he did, he certainly wouldn't let him by killed. Given the fact that the church has been persecuted for much of its history in many parts of the world, and given Jesus' talk about the true way being narrow, and the prevalence of false prophets (Mat 7:13-15), one could just as easily argue that Mat 16:18 was intended to fit a small church that would not be triumphant in any worldly way, but whose survival would be guaranteed by Christ until the End, in which their victory would finally become visible. So perhaps the Baptists are right after all -- Baptist historians have tried to identify a small, persecuted minority who held to Baptist principles throughout history. (I should note that responsible Baptist historians now are rightly critical of some of the traditional Baptist Sunday School histories.) Furthermore, what are we to say about the fact that for most of its life the church has been in schism of one sort or another? Gnostics, Donatists, monophysites, East vs. West, the Protestant Reformation. If the church is protected from error, eventually we may have to consider the possibility that doctrinal disagreement and multiple organizations is not the sort of error that the church is protected against. I think a much more plausible model is that the church is continuously in danger of getting off track. No one organization is infallible. Rather, God uses all these different groups as correctives, to bring the church as a whole back into line. In my view, the Reformation is an example of this. By the 16th Cent., the church had come to invest entirely too much pride in its unity of organization. While Christ was still present in it, the organizational trappings had begun to be in danger of overwhelming the message it was supposed to be presenting. The Reformation created a situation where we could no longer take pride in a single, united Church. Like the Tower of Babel, it was both a judgement on human pride, and a preventative: it guards against similar thing happening again. One major problem I see with the Catholic Church is that it has not accepted God's judgement. By continuing to regard itself as the one Church of Christ, it has not accepted God's judgement that a single church is too dangerous to allow.