Q&A: Understanding the Differences Between Catholicism and Protestantism

(upbeat music) - What does it look like to be deeply rooted in Christ in a world of cultural chaos? Welcome to the Equip Podcast. I'm Mark Vance, lead pastor at Cornerstone Church of Ames, and each week we want to look at core biblical truths that will equip you to live a life of faithfulness, to be salt and light wherever Jesus has called you. - I'm Emily Jensen and I'm here with Mark Vance. We are wrapping up the series about why you are a Protestant, but really, good to identify that. - Yeah, it is. - But really, you took this as an opportunity to explain some of the key differences between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church, and so you walked through four different episodes, and now we get a chance to wrap up with some practical questions, and just really getting into the nitty-gritty. Especially, I'm thinking of the people who came from a Catholic background, grew up in the Catholic Church, have found themselves now in the Protestant tradition, and are trying to reconcile some of this, or maybe who have close friends and family members, and they're just trying to figure out how do I navigate some of our differences, so. - It's important to say here, we did four episodes where I'm trying to give clear theological explanation of the differences, with charity and clarity, but it does bring up, like now, a million wisdom questions. Should I date a Catholic? What about my cousin who, you know, and so I actually find Emily, most of the questions that I get as a pastor are in the wisdom zone, and I need to lay the theological foundation because that's what's gonna lend us to getting the best answers for the wisdom, but I think lots of the questions people are gonna have, if they listen carefully to this series, are really practical things, so I'm excited to dive into them. - Okay, so let's dive in for that person, who, again, grew up in the Catholic Church, still have very close family members, or someone who's like, hey, my best friend is a practicing Catholic, from what I can tell the believer within the Catholic Church, what should someone's goal or, like, posture be towards them? Should they be trying to sway them out of the Catholic Church, or just live with more doctrinal faithfulness within the Catholic Church? - Okay, that's a good question. So let's first zoom out and kind of, we mentioned this in one of the episodes, what saves a person is not connection to an institutional church, what saves a person is connection to the person of Christ, received by faith. So you can be a gospel-believing Lutheran, a gospel-believing Catholic, a gospel-believing Baptist. All of those churches, we try to say this, there is an essence of what is the one true church. There are some places that claim to be a church that deviate from that by denying key teachings of scripture or cardinal doctrines. I think, for instance, the quote unquote, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormons are not Christian, they deny the Trinity. Catholics do not deny the Trinity, we agree on that, right? And so because of that, those who would identify with a Catholic church, the key question is not do you attend that church on Sunday, but do you understand the teaching of scripture and do you know that you have a personal relationship with Christ through faith? So what I want to do is first zoom out before I get into, should you get to this church or that church, I want to first ask a question of, do you know Jesus and are you confident in that? And I want to start there with anybody from any church background, you know? No matter what church you grew up in, I don't assume. Somebody comes to Cornerstone and says, "Yeah, I grew up in a church just like Cornerstone." I don't assume that you know the Lord. I want to say, talk to me just a little bit about what it means to understand Christ. What is the nature of the gospel? So I'm gonna interrogate that with gentleness for anybody. Having then determine, okay, let's say, we're using the hypothetical Emily. My friend does have a real understanding of the gospel, and I believe is genuinely born again by the Spirit of God. Okay, let's say that's our scenario. In that scenario, now what we do have to ask is while they might be part of a true church, is this a more or less healthy church? And we, I do think, have credible reasons to say that while the Roman Catholic church may be an expression of the true church, inside of those churches that are true, they can be more or less clear on the gospel, more or less clear on the teaching of Jesus, and therefore more or less healthy for a person to attend. I've tried to make the case that while true Christianity is present inside of Roman Catholicism, it's obscured. It's jumbled in there with a system of people and fallibility and the authority of the church and the sacramental systems. And while some may thrive in their faith inside of that, many won't. And so I think if you see a person who has clear faith in Jesus, but they're not growing, in invitation to say, well, have you ever considered coming to a church that's different from that one? I think that's a fine thing to do. Because it's not just that we're concerned with someone's eternal destiny. Like, well, check it off the box. They're not going to go to hell. Therefore, who cares? No, we're also concerned with their thriving personal faith in Jesus' day to day. And I do think that that means we should hardly extend an invitation to anyone in any quote-unquote church context who's just honestly not thriving in their faith. That's kind of what we're after there. So the summary is, you can have a person who is truly united to Christ by faith, who is not participating in the healthiest church expression. And I do think in love, an invitation to come with you if you're thriving in a local church that loves God is just a healthy thing in love to do. Totally makes sense. OK, let's stay along the lines of relational questions. What about someone who is coming to salt or they're coming back to church for maybe the first time in a while, and they grew up Catholic? And then it's time to go home for the holidays. And mom and dad are asking a lot of questions about what are you doing not going to a Catholic church? Are you not going to raise your kids Catholic? What does it look like for someone to honor their family, honor their upbringing, and have those conversations in a way that's like respectful? Well, I think the first thing is maybe a couple things to say what not to do. I would not go back and be like, I'm never stepping foot in that false teaching center of the Antichrist again. You know, like don't blast your family, OK? That's a great way to present a ton of division. OK, here's another way to really go about it badly. Is don't express any gratitude at all. Like, if you grew up in a Catholic church, what you should be grateful for is that you grew up with respect for Christ. You heard the creed said, you may not have understood it. And so what you want to do is not contrast what you grew up with say, mom and dad, you know nothing. No, say, you know what I've realized is a lot of what I heard growing up. I don't know that I ever understood fully. And so what we're trying to do is build a bridge through gracious thankfulness for what we had versus anger over how dare you keep, OK, so a lot of kids who literally come alive to God get a little fiery because they automatically assume what everybody who doesn't have what I have must have never told me. So what I find works best is actually show and tell methodology versus argue and yell methodology. And so show and tell methodology looks like this. Mom and dad, I have just really come to this vibrant depth of my relationship with Jesus. And I would love to share with you what I am just so excited about. So it's this message, share the podcast, share a spot if I think, give a YouTube link so that they can-- this message at Salt Company was just so helpful to me. I love this. I want-- because for parents, you're excited about what your kid's excited about. And many times, if your kid comes home and preaches at you, you're not used to that relational dynamic. You're used to being the authority of them. So you go home and try to preach to your parents and get them all-- it's not going to work. But if instead you say, oh, I want to share this with you. Or when you're in town, I love going to church at Cornerstone. Would you come with me? Show and tell. Come with me versus argue and yell. Mom and dad, I've been studying this. And I'm convinced that you guys aren't born again. That line into your parents is unlikely to work. So inside of family relationships, remember you will have a long-term relationship that needs to be preserved. And so what we want to do is instead of saying, you're not this, focus on, God has done this in me that's so beautiful and good. And I want to share anything that's beautiful and good with you guys because I love you. So invite them with you to church. Share a message that you heard. Share a podcast. And then say, what did you think of that? Get curious first. And so I find, Emily, that that method and that approach of loving, care, and sharing what's real to you is most often well received by parents. But the hard, direct, brutal, confrontational approach, that does not go as well. What did you say? Show and tell, don't-- Show and tell don't argue and yell. OK, that could be probably used in a lot of areas of life. Oh, yes, yes. OK, let's move towards somebody who's dating. Oh, my, yeah, that's a big question. And just for anyone who's listening, I don't have a couple in mind, but I feel like someone is going to be like, they're talking about me. Yeah, no, we're not talking about you. But hypothetically, again, let's say there's somebody insult and one person grew up Catholic. The other person comes from a Protestant background. They're not thinking ahead yet of how we're going to raise our kids. And this could potentially become an issue, especially if the one person is like, oh, yeah, I was planning to continue on and raise my kids in the Catholic church. How would you advise a dating couple in that situation? Is it like no big deal, both are Christians, or is that going to become a big deal down the road? OK, so if you're a insult company, you know that I have a little tool that I use to talk about what dating means. So first, we need to talk about what sort of relationship am I in? OK, so Emily, I'm going to review this for the listeners or watchers here. I talk about dating in a scale of 0 to 5, a kind of romantic relationship. 0 is basically like a crush. Oh, that's a cute human, OK? 1 is I need a quote unquote date to go with me to homecoming dance. OK, OK, it's not like I'm not looking to have a serious relationship here. Number 2 is I'd like to take that person out on a date and get coffee and look at them in their face while they look at me in my face. And we have a cordial conversation over a warm drink or walking around a pond. And we may or may not hold hands when we pray. And then number 3 is like, no, we're dating. And this is getting on down the road, like we don't see other people. And this is pretty serious. And we're really exploring whether we would like to move toward marriage. Stage 4, there's a ring on it. And we are an old word betrothed. We are engaged. We are pursuing-- we're headed toward marriage unless a train runs across a trash and knocks us off. And the number 5 is we're married, OK? 0 to 5. At stage 0, you can have a crush on anyone who is of the opposite gender. And that is actually good and holy, because God built you to be attracted to other human beings. And that's a good gift. What we do with that can become unholy if we pursue that too much. But a crush is not lust. A crush is just an awareness. That person is cute, neat. And I just want to affirm that in my boys, and in my girl, not as much, but in my boys, I affirm it. It's been a struggle for me, actually. I find this in my-- I'm much more protective of the girl of Avery. She says, if she were to say a boy's cute, I'd be like, no, he's not. He's stupid. And I would just-- that would be my instinctive reaction. No, he's not. But the boys, I'm like, yeah, all right, good. And I'm like, I don't know why that is. But crushes are fine, OK? OK, crushes and Catholicism. Yeah, you can have a crush on a Catholic. It's fine, OK. But category one, I just need a living human being to go with me, to homecoming, whatever. That's not serious, OK? I don't tell your date that. I just invited you, because you're loving me and I-- Yeah, well, you're breathing. You can go with me, it's not honoring. But now, OK, now this is where we're-- I'm going to ask somebody to go out with me. This is category two and category three. The problem here is that category zero and one, they really don't have any long-term destination that I'm moving toward. So in that case, I don't care really. It's fine, just be with a decent human. And actually, I'd be delighted, if my daughter went with some of her Catholic friends to homecoming, it's fine. They care about her, they care about Jesus. It's going to be fine. She's going to be safe with them and respected. But now, I'm thinking, who would I like to date for the purpose of thinking about a relationship that's going to go longer term potentially? OK, so I'm out of high school dating phase where it's just like cutes and crushes. And now I'm thinking about a destination. The problem here is that for a Protestant Christian to a Roman Catholic Christian, our traditions of how we approach worship think particularly about baptism, Emily. A good Roman Catholic has to baptize their children. And one of the seven sacraments is the sacrament of marriage. They're going to want to be married by a priest within the church. They almost need to be. OK, there can be conditions. But what I'm saying is the way you practice your faith, which is central to your identity, is very different. So I describe marriage as you both get into a canoe. You've got an or your husband's got an or. And you're both rowing. And if you're not rowing in unison, in the same direction, what you are going to have is a frustrating and unhealthy marriage. Now, let's take what's most central to us. And let's not just have us row a little bit different. Let's have us start rowing in very different directions. What you now have is a conflict at the heart of your union. I wouldn't advise a person to get married to someone in that state. So therefore, when people have asked, should I date a Catholic? My answer is no. And my answer is no, not because I don't think they're a believer, not because I don't think they love and know Jesus. My answer is because the way in which you would need to practice your faith is this opened up over time is so different that either you or they will have to fundamentally compromise on how you pursue Jesus to continue to pursue one another. And I just don't think that's going to work. It is exceedingly, exceedingly rare. Yeah, good word there. So let's transition a little bit to some of the theology, the technicalities. One thing you did talk about was scripture and authority and some of the differences between Protestant Roman Catholic. But if I'm remembering this right, don't Roman Catholics have a different Bible and a different canon of scripture? So I guess, what's up with that? It's my casual question. And then should that concern us as Protestants at all, that who's got the right Bible? Yeah, great. So boy, I want to go so incredibly technical here. And answer it in like three to five minutes. I'm going to go short form and I'm going to give a couple references. One, I've referred to Gavin Orton a lot on this podcast. Gavin has great stuff here. On how does the canon of scripture get set up? What is that work? And I'm going to point out my favorite guy of all time on this is guy, his scholarly name Michael Kruger. Michael Kruger. And his work on canon is the best from an evangelical perspective. And he has incredible stuff explaining how the history of this works and what about the Catholic books and stuff. OK, so first, do Catholics have a different Bible? The answer is yes, but no. And so what I mean by that is that what the Catholics have done is they have kept inside of the canon, what are called duteral canonical books or apocryphal books, things like second Maccabees. Really, they're the books that if you have an Old Testament and New Testament, they are coming out of the silent years in between. Luther and the Protestant Reformers would have said, while these books are not scripture, they are helpful to read. They call them the historical books. So they had no problem with people reading them. Their problem was they felt like both the early church and the ancient church and the history of the church didn't put those books as scripture. They just put them as historical. Jerome, when he first puts together the vulget, that's a Latin translation that becomes the accepted Bible in the Western, the Roman Catholic church. Jerome himself seems pretty clear from the historical evidence didn't think that he saw those books as scripture. He saw them as historical. But because he put them with that Latin translation in the vulget, people almost begin to incorporate them in. That seems to be how the doctrinal development goes. There's nothing inside of those books that is going to lead to any sort of wild new doctrine that's gonna come out. Some will point out that inside of Maccabees, there may be something that leads toward what is later developed into the doctrine of purgatory and Roman Catholic tradition. Outside of that, you're not gonna see anything in those that's like, and I'll tell you what, Jesus isn't God. It, no, no, no, no, it's not that. So they're not heretical, they're just historical. So a historical book in that sense, I would see them like the writings of Clement or the Didache or the Shepherd of Hermes. They're good, they're helpful, they're historical works. They absolutely, you can read them, they're really interesting. They're just not held up inside of what is seen as scripture, not by how Christ refers to them, not by how the apostles refer to them. And some of what we know that from Emily is quotation and illusion. If we look at the New Testament, what we can see, the New Testament writers consider scripture, we can look at the things they reference and quote. They either quote or elude and there are tons of Old Testament. Just look at the columns of the references in your Bible and see how many of them look backward to that. They almost never look back to anything that we can even source to those books. There might be a passing reference, maybe in Jude. But what I'm talking about is there's tons of references to Isaiah and to Jeremiah from all over the Psalms in the New Testament. The New Testament writers are unbelievably familiar with the source of authority they call scripture and they're appealing to the law and the prophets, the Torah, the Tenak, the Tenak ordering of the Torah, Naviyim and Ketivim. Okay, so the Bible that Jesus uses has an Old Testament that looks like Torah, Naviyim, Ketivim, which is the Old Testament we have. The New Testament canon of scriptures. Michael Kruger is gonna point out, and I think this is the doctrine that is most helpful here is that we don't make things scripture. A work of scripture is scripture the moment that God authors it, okay? But what we would affirm as Protestants is that we recognize the character of something is scripture. It is scripture whether we, so we don't make it scripture. It's scripture because of its authorship, but it is recognized by the church as scripture in a process called canonization. What we have inside that process of canonization is the ordered books of Old and New Testament are articulated, but very clearly they're being used from the earliest days, very, very, very early. But they're articulated in their fullest forms after the Marcianite heresy presses in in the third and fourth centuries. We have scripture before that. So people like, well, we didn't have scripture until it was articulated at that council. No, no, no, no. We had scripture from the moment it was written. Those books were widely distributed from the very earliest days of their writing. The reason we know that again is quotation. If we only had the writings of the early church fathers, both the apostolic, the sub-apastolic and the early Catholic fathers, we would be able to put together Emily all the entirety of the New Testament simply off of what they quote, because they quote constantly. So some people will say, well, why did we get include that book and not the Gospel of Thomas? Well, here's the thing, none of the early church fathers quote from the Gospel of Thomas. Because the Gospel of Thomas is a nostic text from the Nakamadi heretical sect. It was never widely distributed. That's so different from the Gospel of Matthew, which is distributed everywhere, quoted by everybody. Okay, so we have incredible historical evidence for the books that are recognized by the early church as scripture. But that recognition process has dialogue and debate as process of a history. So what we don't have, that Catholic church would say, well, it's scripture because we said it scripture. You remember because they have church as authority over scripture, right? And what we're saying is no. It's scripture because God authored scripture by the spirit and it was recognized by the church for process of canonization. Look at the works of Michael Krueger, but long summation of a long answer. Hopefully I got a three to five minutes is that I'm not worried about there being the Apocryphal books in a Catholic binding of the Bible. They're fine for history, just recognize that in the earliest areas of the church they were never seen as something that was equivalent to older New Testament, but supplemental to it. And if you wanna go read them, it's totally fine. They're not gonna mess you up. It'll be your interesting reading. - Okay, helpful word there. So at the beginning of the series, you mentioned, you kinda give the history of the Roman Catholic church. How it started and then how it started to deviate from the accretions that accumulate over time. - Right, and so I'm just curious how you see that may be happening in the Protestant church. Like where are we using that broadly? Adding traditions and expectations about the way church ought to be that are not biblical. - Okay, so this is where church history is so helpful to us, Emily. Let's take Martin Luther and John Calvin. Martin Luther, John Calvin, the magisterial reformers could not imagine a world where the church in the state were not completely interwoven, okay? So John Calvin heads up Geneva and he actually runs the town. Okay, he orders, they're operating even off of the same Augustinian, oh man, I don't wanna use highly technical language, but I'm going to hear just a little bit. They're operating off the same Augustinian perspective that led to the inquisition that heretical ideas are dangerous to people eternally, therefore should be punishable even by death by civil authorities. - Okay. - So hence Calvin authorizes the drowning of Servetus. Okay, so they punish by death people inside of their territories that they actually exert authority over as church. So they wed the church in the state all together in this jumbly thing. Now, I want you to think Emily with me. Do we see that sort of church and state wedding together inside of the New Testament? What doesn't seem that we do? In fact, later as Protestants have considered it, Baptists have authored a doctrine called the separation of church and state. By that, we do not mean that we don't think that you can have a Christian nation, but we do believe that there is distinction in God's teaching between the authority of his church and the authority of the state. Okay, that clearly wasn't entirely taught. In fact, I think Luther went, sometimes it seems like he's for it, sometimes he wants to use the state. It's unclear. So because as Protestants, we consider the scripture as the only infallible authority. It actually gives us an opportunity to look at the practices of the Protestant church, both historically and present day, and ask the question, does this conform to what we are taught in scripture? Where the phrase in the Protestant information is simple refermata. We are always reforming. Rome cannot be that. So my claim, and I want it to be modest, is not that we have everything right and they have everything wrong. I don't want to say it that way. What I want to say is that Rome, Roman Catholicism, does not have a mechanism of self-correction. Since they have an authoritative proclamation from the pope that dictates the life and ordering of the church, the catechisms, the papal magisterium, the papal bulls, you can't go against those. And you can't go reform those because they're written with papal infallibility. In the Protestant tradition, I can look at even Lutheran Calvin, who I hold in his high ministerial authorities. I don't want to go against their teaching, but I'm able to look at it carefully, and if it seems that they clearly deviate from scripture, since scripture is our only infallible authority, we can reform our practices to better conform to scripture. My argument is Protestantism, therefore, has a better mechanism of self-correction than Rome has. So now let's look at the contemporary evangelical church. I threw a new term in there. I've been contrasting, and we might actually want to do a podcast on this. I was thinking about this one. I've been contrasting Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Well, I'm an evangelical Protestant. And by that, I'm a certain blend of Protestant that conforms generally to the Bevington quadrilateral and you can Google that if you want to know Biblicalism and Activism. So there's a way of doing evangelical Protestant Christianism. That's even different just the general term of Protestantism. You have high church Protestantism and low church. Okay, so some people are like, "Oh, it's crazy. It's too no." It's because we're trying to make the best sense of what conforms to scripture. And so I look at my present kind of low church, high energy evangelical Protestant model. And I think there's some of the stuff that we do that Emily just feels silly to me. Our lack of connection to authority, our obsession with that is cool and hip and trying to be culturally relevant. That I think we bear some very serious reflection. The way we trivially treat the sacraments of the Lord's Supper and Communion, clearly those are a big deal. A really, really big deal in the history of the church. We need to give serious thought as to whether our practices rightly conform to the teaching of scripture that infallible authority and the mysterious authorities of what we have handed down to us through the church. We should give serious pause to that. I actually think part of the appeal sometimes of Roman Catholicism is the triviality of modern Protestantism. - Yeah. - And so what happens is people look over and go, "That seems ancient, rooted and serious." And I went to that church in the pastor just drove a Harley down the aisle. What? And I get it. I look at that and I go, "Yeah." - It's nauseating. - It is. And so can we just, as Protestants, while I'm trying to give a clarity of articulation of the differences, I would hope people, if they hung out with me, would hear me be much more serious about what I worry about in terms of ways that the tradition that I'm a part of might deviate or not be fully conformed to what could be best according to scripture. So I think that there are numbers of practices that inside the modern evangelical church, we need to seriously ask the question, does this conform to scripture? Does this seem to be the best articulation of it? My hope is that actually inside of evangelical and Protestant theology, we have the mechanism because of our reformation to be in line with scripture to correct our excesses and get them more in line. So the summary is, yeah, I think we have plenty of flaws too. I just think we have a better mechanism to get those corrected than does the Roman Catholic church. - Mm-hmm, super helpful and hopeful. And I hope that yeah, everybody who's been listening through this series has a better handle on the differences. - Yes. - And even after this episode, I think some of that practical wisdom, and I like what you said all along, charity and clarity. - Well, and Emily, charity and clarity, maybe if I could give a final word, a gentle recognition that the unity of the church matters to Jesus and should matter to us. We shouldn't be unnecessarily trying to throw elbows where we don't have to. And I think increasingly what's gonna happen is as the forces of secularism advance, you're gonna figure out that us and Roman Catholics have a lot more in common than us and contemporary liberal quote-unquote Christian churches because we hold very traditional views of family, of sexuality, of marriage, of human decency, of there's so many areas where actually the churches in that nice scene tradition, that trinitarian tradition, we will do good work together in the public sphere as the pressure against the church increases. What you're gonna figure out is that we have quite a bit in common, that we can build on in meaningful ways. That doesn't mean I'm like looking to get together and on Sundays start to worship together regularly. I think there's significant enough differences that still remain between us and Rome, that that doesn't make sense. But in an increasingly secular word world, I just wanna remember that those who truly love Christ, who affirm his deity are people that we owe clarity and charity to in both ways. And so I hope that this can be something of a model toward that, while understanding there's still differences that remain, that there is a lot that we can build on, which is unifying. - Well, great series and we have been planning a big year for 2026, there's a really good stuff ahead. So stay tuned and I think you're gonna be talking a little bit about revival. - Oh yeah. - Coming up. - We're coming back on revival. We're gonna talk about AI in the future. I know that's coming around the corner. There's so much. And as always, thanks to all of you guys who listen, who write in questions, who talk to me in the halls at Cornerstone and say, "Hey, would you record an equipped thing on that?" It's so helpful to get that feedback because it lets us know this is designed to be responsive pastoral theology. And so it's really your inputs and your questions that prompt me to get curious and try to dig in and do a little bit of helpful research and record these podcasts. - All right, thanks Mark. (upbeat music)