Catholicism: Evangelical, And More Than Evangelical

In Catholicism, the classical Evangelical finds a Church that in fact has always held Scripture to be normative among the loci of authority within her life, and has never formally excluded the possibility that, should such a circumstance arise, Scripture’s teaching might suffice for salvation. But she believes in the Bible as it actually exists objectively, thereby compelling her to explore joyfully the full richness both of the biblical literature itself and of its context in the whole Church’s communal experience and proclamation of Christ.

Furthermore, Catholic theology as such, as opposed to a Late Mediaeval Western popular piety very much akin to contemporary popular faux Evangelicalism, has never been under the slightest misapprehension about where the initiative lies regarding salvation: God freely saves us by His grace, undeserving sinners though we are, and He does so only because of the saving acts of Jesus Christ, and above all because of Christ’s at once substitutionary, exemplary and victorious atonement.

However, God does not merely declare the sinner righteous forensically, as if as a sort of legal fiction, but actually initiates and effects a process whereby righteousness is genuinely brought about through willing co-operation with His grace. For some people, this involves conversion and assurance as classically understood by Evangelical Protestants; for others, the experience of conversion and assurance is different. Both happen, so Rome has never rejected either, but has anathematised merely the narrow insistence on the former.

And there is certainly no doubt at all that God, being God, foreknows and in some sense predestines who is to be saved, but the workings of the mystery of election are not given to us to understand, and it is not our place to speculate upon them.

Evangelistic zeal was for centuries a Catholic rather than a Protestant phenomenon, with Calvin simply ruling out the re-establishment of the office of evangelist on the grounds that, like that of apostle, its function belonged to days long past, when (in his view) churches were being founded. By contrast, such Catholics as Saint Francis Xavier were hugely effective in this field, and movements in the same direction among Protestants were overwhelmingly either themselves High Church (such as SPCK and SPG/USPG in the Church of England) or else (like early Methodism) deeply rooted in High Churchmanship.

Of course, Catholic evangelisation is as concerned as that of any later Evangelical to foster a personal relationship between the individual and Jesus Christ. But it strongly emphasises that there is no Christ without his Body, and thus no true relationship with Him except in the context of her communal participation in the life of the Triune God.

Catholic history abounds with movements for the reform, revival and renewal of the Church at times of crisis or corruption, through the Holy Spirit’s raising up and subsequent use of minorities at the cutting edge. The Franciscans and the Dominicans are the most obvious examples (and very important God has proved them, too), but there are also many, many more. Being ecclesia semper reformanda has always been an integral part of being ecclesia semper idem.

Central to many such reforming, reviving and renewing movements has been and is the truth that every Christian has a vocation, to be lived out in whatever course of life he or she pursues. Bizarrely, this thoroughly Biblical, Patristic (up to and including High Mediaeval) and Tridentine idea is frequently alleged to have begun with the Reformers. One is at a loss as to how or why such a misconception arose, especially when so much of the Reformation (not least in England) involved replacing a lay-led and highly participatory church with a sort of clerical caste, as well as largely abandoning any claim by the Church to exercise her Prophetic Office in the economic and political spheres.

Once laypeople started going to church only to hear sermons, and not also to meditate before the Blessed Sacrament or to pray in union with a saint who was depicted there, they ceased to have any cause to enter a church unless they knew for certain that a clergyman would be present. The abomination that is locked churches duly followed, long before even Catholics became forced to adopt the practice by the fear of crime.

Where many Catholics really do need to return to Scripture and to the Fathers in a way that the best Protestants have never departed from them is in recognising the equality and complementarity of the respective ministries of men and women, of clergy and laypeople, of priests and deacons, of seculars and professed religious, of those called to marriage and those called to celibacy, and so on ad infinitum. But such a recognition, pace much of contemporary Evangelical and Liberal Protestantism, depends precisely on a profoundly grateful appreciation of the distinctiveness of each of these ministries, and it is therefore inimical to any attempt to homogenise them.

Within what is now called “every-member ministry”, which Catholics invented and Protestants tried to dismantle, the Catholic Church certainly maintains the three-fold pattern of Holy Orders – Bishop, Priest and Deacon – in the tangible Apostolic Succession through the imposition of hands with prayer. That succession by that profoundly Biblical means is a matter of historical fact, which no one thought to dispute until it suited certain people’s purposes to do so after sixteen centuries.

However, it must be distinguished from the seriously deficient Anglo-Catholic and other theories of Apostolic Succession purely in terms of hands on heads; the hands of a community are laid on the heads of a community, and episcopi vagantes do not get a look in. Valid (i.e., absolutely certain) orders are a matter, not of historical descent alone, but of present belonging to a body, including to its history.

The marks of that Body, the Church, include sanctity and apostolicity, which themselves include moral and doctrinal orthodoxy, so that the tangible Apostolic Succession always associated with Catholicism is inseparable from and the Evangelical Succession of the best Protestants.

Furthermore, those most faithful to the heritage of the Magisterial Reformation have always maintained the episcopal, presbyteral and diaconal functions, even if they have often abandoned the corresponding forms. This strange abandonment is made even stranger by their very frequent insistence that those to be admitted to such functions must receive the imposition of hands with prayer from those who are already so commissioned.

Also within the collaborative and participatory ministry of the Catholic Church as a whole, one encounters the myriad of what are regarded in Protestant circles as parachurch bodies. These organisations and institutions are seen by Evangelical Protestants as comprising members of the Church who come together to do such things as the Church is called to do (such as providing educational resources), but not those things which only the Church can ever do – preaching the Word and administering the Sacraments. No split between these bodies and the One Body afflicts the Catholic Church, and Catholic voluntary agencies, apostolic religious orders and secular institutes are fully integrated into the Church’s overseeing (that is, episcopal) structures.

The Preaching of the Word has always been held by Rome, at least in principle, to be the priest’s primary duty; if this calls for a renewal in the art of Sacred Oratory, not least in the seminaries, then such a renewal can only be effected from the inside. Without in any way wishing to endorse the (especially Anglican) academic and class snobbery in anglophone countries about the highly questionable alleged superiority of Protestant preaching, it has to be said that improvement can only ever be both necessary and desirable, not always so much in terms of style as in terms of the degree of importance attached, in practice, to this chief among apostolic ministries.

In order to be more fully herself, the Catholic Church needs to encourage large numbers of her members to learn the culture of the Word from that Evangelical tradition which is historically (if no longer necessarily) separated from her full communion. Such a culture is one in which the defining narratives are those of the Old and New Testaments, and examples of it range from Handel to Holman Hunt.

All cultures define and perpetuate themselves by telling stories, and the Bible culture initially arose in order to fill the gaps left after the Reformation where the Lives of the Saints had previously been. Catholicity, however, requires both, not least in order to express the indivisible continuity between the Bible and the Church. Catholics are not being asked to take on anything remotely Protestant as such here: look at the Liturgy, at the Fathers (up to and including the Mediaeval Doctors), at the Mediaeval and post-Mediaeval mystics, and at the iconography and other spirituality of the Christian East (whether Catholic or separated). Taking on is a defining mark of Catholicism, which radically distinguishes the Catholic Church from the giving up that characterises Protestantism.

And the Bible culture needs to be like every other aspect of the living out of the Catholic Faith in being transmitted from generation to generation through the united efforts of the Catholic parish, the Catholic school and the Catholic home – “the Church in miniature”. Catholics are the most fervent Evangelicals in our belief in the family, founded on the God-given, and not man-made, institution of Holy Matrimony. At the same time, Catholics attach no less importance to the complementary bonds of friendship in building up a society of mutual obligation and enjoyment, reflecting both the Trinitarian God and the earthly life of Jesus Christ.