This month will see blanket media coverage of World Youth Day in Sydney as well as implications of the Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem. Both events raise questions about what it means to be an "Anglican' Christian, and how this differs from being Roman Catholic. We asked our panel to answer five frequently asked questions about the difference between Catholics and Protestants, and if these still matter today.
Which came first, the Bible or the Church?
Answered by Mark Gilbert
I remember the time when my parents invited a 60-year-old Catholic priest to talk to me about my decision to leave the Catholic Church.
I was lucky, I had been learning from the Bible for 10 years by this stage and was about 30 years old " for many Catholics who leave, this sort of thing happens much earlier.
The night was pretty unsatisfactory " we ended up vigorously defending our own positions, but it was helpful as it highlighted a very major difference. He kept arguing that the Bible was "The Book of the Catholic Church", it was written and approved by it, and to understand it you had to listen to the Catholic Church, whereas I kept arguing that the Bible formed the Church. When God spoke, his chosen people gathered, listened and obeyed.
It really came down to a question of where you place authority.
Recent teaching on the issue from the Catholic Church comes from Vatican II, a large meeting of the Pope and bishops in Rome in the late 1960s. Here they state:
"It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God's most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls."
Paul makes it clear in 1 Timothy 3:15:
"If I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of truth."
The church is the support structure for the truth found in God's word " always underneath, supporting, testifying, upholding. Never above " interpreting, re-interpreting, dictating and controlling.
The Catholic Church describes its Tradition, Authority and the Bible like a tripod made of three equal legs. Paul describes the Bible as the truth under-girded by the church, which submits to it.
Didn't Anglicans break from the Pope just so Henry VIII could get divorced?
Answered by Jeremy Halcrow
KEY VERSE:
"If a man marries his brother’s wife, it is an act of impurity; he has dishonoured his brother. They will be childless." Leviticus 20:21
Theologian Thomas Cranmer argued the Bible forbids taking the wife of one's brother, so Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon was invalid, despite having received papal approval. This notion that the Bible could overrule the Pope proved decisive in the King's course of action.
Henry VIII's desire to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was not the real issue in the split from Rome.
The Rev Dr Colin Bale, who lectures in Church History at Moore College, says it is important to understand that Protestant ideas were active in England prior to the political crisis over the divorce " important scholars like Tyndale and Cranmer believed the church should go back to its biblical roots.
As events unfolded, it was clear the authority of Scripture over the Pope was at the centre of the political crisis. The King heard that Thomas Cranmer, a theology professor at Cambridge University, argued that the Pope did not have the authority to set aside a clear scriptural commandment against a moral sin. The King invited Cranmer to join his team of scholars as his ambassador to the Emperor in Germany.
Dr Ashley Null explains that while in Germany, Cranmer came further under the influence of Protestantism. Not only did he marry the niece of a German reformer but he also acquired a clearly Protestant understanding of justification by Christ alone and faith alone.
Then, quite unexpectedly, Henry VIII called Cranmer back to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. He accepted the position, seeing his task to use such a powerful position to restore the English Church to its biblical roots. And that's what Cranmer did.
Under Henry's successor, the boy king Edward VI, Cranmer was freed to implement his thoroughly Protestant vision for the English Church. He put together the three key formularies of the Church of England: the Book of Homilies, the Book of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion.
Although Cranmer was later executed during the bloody reign of Catholic Queen Mary, these formularies were the foundation of Queen Elizabeth's Settlement of the English Reformation in 1559.
"They should define every Anglican church today," says Colin Bale.
Therefore, Cranmer's Protestant theology is essential for understanding the origins of the Anglican Communion.
To sum up: the events around Henry VIII's divorce established the principle that the Bible, not the Pope, is the supreme authority. As UK bishop Colin Buchanan argues in Is the Church of England Biblical?, this principle allows the Anglican Church to not only value its past, in being directly historically connected to the early church, but also be free of papal power.
Won't highlighting differences just encourage the old sectarian divisions better left in the past?
Answered by Jeremy Halcrow
KEY DATE " 1868:
The first Royal Tour of Australia ended in tragedy when Prince Albert, the Duke of Edinburgh, was shot and seriously wounded by Henry O'Farrell. It was claimed that O'Farrell was a member of the Fenians " a terrorist group seeking to violently overthrow British rule in Ireland. The assassination attempt fuelled sectarianism in NSW.
No one wants a return to the terrible sectarianism that dominated Australia's history for the first 150 years. Sydney Anglicans should repent of the role our forebears played in some of these episodes.
However it is important that we keep the past in perspective and realise that sectarianism does not inevitably arise out of theological disagreement.
Sydney University historian Mike Thompson has argued that so-called "religious conflicts' are usually the result of political leaders co-opting the motivating power of belief to further their temporal goals.
From its convict roots, sectarianism in Sydney was driven by fear of Irish Catholic sedition against the British Empire. It was the predominantly Irish convict uprising at Vinegar Hill in 1804 that led Governor King to remove his approval for the Catholic priest James Dixon to minister.
Sectarian tensions in Sydney worsened measurably with the founding of the Fenians in Dublin on St Patrick's Day 1858. The Fenians were an armed Irish republican movement dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of British rule. The real threat of violence in Britain posed by an armed Fenian movement fed fear amongst Sydney Protestants of the "Irish terrorist menace'.
The press stoked the hysteria " for example, one Sydney newspaper in 1865 breathlessly reported a massive Fenian rally in New York, where an estimated 30,000 Irish-Americans turned out to hear Colonel William Roberts proclaim that "Blood must wash out what blood and crime have stained' to the booming cheers of the crowd.
Some of the reporting was blatantly racist " cartoons depicted the Irish as "White Negroes' or "Celtic monkeys'. In 1862 Punch magazine claimed the Irish were Darwin's "missing link'.
The "Fenian' assassination attempt on Prince Alfred at Clontarf in Sydney (see box) led to a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment. Membership of the Orange Order soared. Over 20,000 people held a mass rally in Sydney the day after the shooting in indignation.
In response NSW politicians, such as Sir Henry Parkes, sought to ban Irish immigration and succeeded in ending Government funding of Catholic schools. The ultimate effect was to drive Catholics into further segregation from the Protestant majority, which fuelled sectarianism into the 20th century.
Much of the worst sectarianism in Sydney's history flows from political events, and the belief that Irish Catholics in Sydney were terrorist sympathisers and not loyal citizens of the British Empire.
There is a complex link between the decline in ethnic-national identity and the rise of secularism. It has been argued that strong Anglican support for the bloodbath of WWI destroyed both the church's moral authority and the Protestant identity of the nation.
Undoubtedly sectarianism waned from 1922 (the last major anti-Irish rally in Sydney) as the political issues changed: an independent Ireland was declared, and Australia began to grow out of a fading Empire in the wake of World War II.
The impact of Vatican II (1962-1965) did play a role in softening Catholic attitudes towards the Protestant churches. However the impact of the ecumenical flowering that followed, which sought Christian unity by downplaying doctrinal differences, has been vastly overstated.
In fact the first joint Catholic and Protestant Christmas carols occurred in the 1950s, quickly followed by the first joint Anzac services: all before Vatican II.
Social and political factors, not papering over theological differences, have driven both the rise and decline of sectarianism in Australia.
Is the issue that caused the Reformation schism (a disagreement over justification by faith alone) relevant any more in 21st-century Australia?
Answered by Mark Thompson
To know that you are right with God, free from the past and freed for the future, is one of the great blessings of the gospel of Jesus the Christ.
Perhaps we only appreciate this truth the way the New Testament writers evidently did, when we have faced squarely two colliding realities " our own deep natural sinfulness and the just judgement of God on all sin and sinfulness.
Human sin brings with it guilt and corruption and enslavement. It makes us enemies of God and of each other. But the powerful, transforming good news of the gospel is that God has acted to deal with each of these consequences as well as the root cause of them all. Jesus' powerful rescue of men and women deals with sin entirely and forever.
Justification by faith was a critical dividing issue at the time of the Reformation. From it arose the slogan "by faith alone' which has been so important to Protestant Christians ever since. But this slogan was always seen as a way of safeguarding and explaining an even more basic Christian truth, namely that our salvation from beginning to end is always only the work of "Christ alone'.
For this reason Martin Luther considered justification by faith to be the truth by which the church stands or falls. Where this truth is clearly understood and boldly proclaimed, the churches flourish. Where this truth is obscured or neglected, the churches languish. Justification doesn't say everything there is to say about our salvation, but it says one of the most important things.
Of course the Roman Catholic Church also spoke about grace and justification, and still does.
However, at each point there are important differences that mean that in the end the Catholic doctrine presents our right standing with God as the result of our cooperation with God's grace. God's grace may be anchored in the great work of Jesus on the cross, but it comes to us through the sacraments of the church and our good works have a critical role to play. Roman Catholics have never been comfortable with justification by faith alone and a righteousness that is reckoned to us.
Today controversy has been caused by a number of Protestant scholars who have insisted the Reformation got it wrong on justification by faith alone. NT "Tom' Wright is one of those scholars. He insists he just wants to return us to the Bible and that those who disagree with him are letting other commitments distort their reading of what the apostle Paul has to say about justification.
John Piper has done us all a service by showing how Tom Wright's redefinition of key terms, his ambiguities and his own unacknowledged theological baggage (especially his understanding of church) fail to do justice to what the Bible actually says and ultimately throw us back on our own resources to face the final verdict of God.
How Do Catholics think About God?
Answered by Mark Gilbert
It is mildly amusing to notice the way Catholics try to evangelise Protestants. A bunch of Catholics have recently produced a book called Surprised by Truth 2. In it they present the stories of 14 Protestants who have converted to Catholicism. What I find noteworthy is that when Catholics try to evangelise Protestants they use lots of personal testimonies, but my hunch is that most of us are more likely to be persuaded by rational arguments from the Scriptures.
It works the other way too. When we try to explain the gospel to Catholics we often use rational arguments from the Scriptures rather than sharing our testimony and talking about how knowing Jesus through the Bible has changed our lives.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe that understanding who Jesus is and what he has done for us clearly through the Bible is the way to go in evangelism, but perhaps it isn't the first thing to talk with Catholics about. Think about how Paul began talking to the Greek philosophers in Acts 17. He started talking to them using the way they thought about God first.
Catholics and Protestants think about God in different ways and if we realise this, then it makes evangelism a lot easier. On the whole, Catholics get to know God by belonging to a church and the experience they have there. Very few Catholics make a rational decision to become Catholic; they are born Catholic. Catholicism is who they are, their identity, their culture. We see this when we go doorknocking and get told, "No thanks, I'm Catholic".
I'm Catholic: who I am is Catholic.
Experience is also very important for Catholics " most Catholic teaching is through symbols " they call them sacraments. As you eat the bread, go to confession, get confirmed, married, priested" you experience God.
So if Catholics think about God in terms of "belonging' and "experience', how can we use this to help them know God clearly through the Bible more easily? Here are two simple suggestions:
"¢ Invite them to belong to something, a playgroup, a youth group, a Bible study, even a sports team with a few Christian mates.
"¢ Share your experiences of being Christian with them, your testimony, what you love about church, how knowing God clearly from the Bible affects your day-to-day lives.
By doing these things it will be easier to do the more difficult job of explaining clearly from the Bible that Jesus has done everything to make them right with God.
The Rev Dr Mark Gilbert is assistant minister at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Kingsford.
Jeremy Halcrow is the editor of Southern Cross newspaper.
The Rev Dr Mark Thompson is Academic Dean at Moore Theological College.
