Transcription
Greetings everyone. In this video, I'll be giving you five reasons why I left Protestantism.
Now, this isn't going to be a positive case for why the Catholic Church is true. I'll probably do that in a separate video. Rather, these are five reasons or arguments that convinced me that Protestantism was false.
So, the first reason is *sola scriptura*, or Bible alone. *Sola scriptura* is probably the most distinctive doctrine of the Protestant Reformation. Historically, it's been defined as scripture is the only infallible rule of faith for Christian doctrine to practice, which means that scripture alone is the word of God and infallible. And all other authorities, whether traditions, councils, or creeds, are fallible, therefore subservient to scripture. And if it's reasonably demonstrated that they contradict the plain words of scripture, they should be rejected.
On the other hand, *sola scriptura* is viewed that scripture is the only rule of faith for Christian doctrine and practice, meaning that all Christian doctrines and practices must come directly from scripture. And it seems to be the most popular position among Protestants today. If you're a Catholic who has debated a Protestant, you've likely heard the phrase, "Where is that in the Bible?" "Where is praying to Mary and the Saints in the Bible?" "Where is the veneration of icons in the Bible?" The assumption is that if something is not explicitly stated in the Bible, it should not be believed or practiced.
However, it's only logical to ask, "Where is that doctrine in the Bible?" I.E., where does the Bible say that all Christian doctrine must come from the Bible? If Protestants cannot show a single passage in the Bible where it claims to be the only rule of faith for Christians, *sola scriptura* fails its own test and must be rejected.
The reality is, the Bible nowhere teaches the doctrine of *sola scriptura*. In fact, the New Testament presents a three-legged stool of authority: namely, scripture, tradition, and the church. Since Protestants and Catholics already agree on the authority of scripture, let us look at what the Bible says about the authority of tradition and the church.
In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul commends the Christians in Corinth for maintaining the tradition handed down to them. And in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, Paul commands Christians to hold fast to both the written and unwritten traditions or teachings of the Apostles. And in 2 Thessalonians 3:6, Christians are warned against fellowship with anyone who doesn't hold to Apostolic Traditions.
Now, some Protestants may argue that these traditions handed down are fallible, unlike scripture, which is infallible. However, 1 Thessalonians 2:13 and Acts 17:13 recognize the oral teachings of the Apostles as the word of God. Therefore, scripture is the word of God, and tradition is the word of God. They must both be infallible and accepted with equal reverence.
When it comes to the authority of the church, scripture says that the church is the pillar and bulwark of the truth. In Matthew 18, Jesus says that if true believers have a dispute, they should go to the church to settle the matter. It's interesting to note how the church here is distinguished from believers as an authority over them, contrary to the common Protestant notion that the believers themselves are the church. And in Hebrews 13, Christians are commanded to obey and submit to the leaders of the church. There, adherence to the authority of the church is not an option but a necessity for the Christian.
And for the first 400 years of Christian history, Christians didn't even have a Bible because it wasn't canonized yet, but they did have the church to rely upon. So, why do we need tradition and the church when we have the written word of God? Firstly, the canonical scripture, I.E., the list of books that make up the Bible, is not found in the Bible itself but defined by the church. So, to even know what scripture is, we must rely on the authority of the church. Likewise, the authorship of scripture, I.E., that Matthew wrote Matthew, Mark wrote Mark, Luke wrote Luke, etc., is not found in the pages of scripture but comes from tradition. And last but not least, the interpretation of scripture must come from the authority of sacred tradition and the magisterium, or teaching authority of the church.
Which brings us to our next reason: the interpretation problem. Essentially, the interpretation problem is: how do Protestants know that they have the right interpretation of scripture? According to the Center for Study of Global Christianity, there were more than 47,000 Protestant denominations, and all of these denominations hold to the Protestant Bible as the final authority. Yet, they come to vastly different conclusions on various doctrines and practices.
For example, Lutherans and Anglicans believe that water baptism saves, while Baptists hold that it's merely a symbol and of no salvific value. Historic Protestant denominations practice infant baptism, while Baptists and Pentecostals only give baptism to professing adults. Lutherans and Anglicans believe salvation can be lost, while Calvinists and many Baptists believe in "once saved, always saved." And these are but a few of the many examples one can give for the doctrinal variance within the Protestant religion.
So, how does the average Protestant work his way through all the differences and come to the knowledge of which doctrines are true and which aren't? After all, every denomination has dozens of biblical passages and interpretations to go along with them to support their particular doctrinal position. Given that God is not the author of confusion, is it more likely that God left us with the book in thousands of ways of interpreting it, or one infallible church and tradition to aid us in understanding His holy word?
St. Vincent of Lérins articulated the interpretation problem of Protestantism more than a thousand years before the Protestant Reformation. He said, "But here someone, perhaps, will ask, since the canon of scripture is complete and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join with it the authority of the church's interpretation? For this reason, because owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another, so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters. Therefore, it is very necessary, on account of so great intricacies of such various error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation."
Now, in response to the problem of interpretation, many Protestant apologists will often say that Protestants largely agree on the primary or essential doctrines but disagree on secondary issues. However, it is quite unclear which doctrines are essential and which are secondary. For example, is the doctrine of the Trinity essential for salvation according to scripture? Keep in mind that I'm not asking whether the Trinity is taught in scripture, but whether it's essential to believe or a Christian. Some Protestants say yes, while others say no. What about the hypostatic union or the inerrancy of scripture? Most Protestants would consider these essential doctrines, but they're never said to be essential in scripture itself. So, how do Protestants come to the conclusion that they are?
The role of works in salvation remains a major point of contention among different Protestant denominations. While all Protestants profess that salvation is by faith alone, they could mean completely different things depending on the denomination. For example, Free Grace Protestants would say that no works are required after one is saved by faith, while Calvinists and other Protestants hold that works are the necessary fruits of salvation. And both of these groups anathematize each other for "teaching a false gospel."
Closely associated with the concept of essential doctrines is the concept of heresies, or doctrines that Christians ought to avoid. Just as Protestants do not have a list of essential doctrines, neither do they have a list of heresies. Rather, it's incumbent on the particular denomination or individual to decide what doctrines are heretical. Some Protestant churches hold that believing in Darwinian evolution is damnable heresy, while others are more open to it. An increasing number of Protestant churches, especially in America and Europe, condone the practice of homosexuality, abortion, and contraception, while Protestants have historically been opposed to them. And Protestants are also divided on the issue of icons. Lutherans and Anglicans are generally more open to the making and veneration of icons, whereas Baptists, Calvinists, and other Protestants condemn all sacred art as idolatry. Thus, it is not abundant and clear in scripture what doctrines are essential and what doctrines constitute heresy, forcing Protestants to come up with their own lists and standards based on human reasoning rather than relying on the standard set by God through His church.
Fourth reason why I left Protestantism is the biblical canon. Protestant Bibles have 66 books, while Catholic Bibles have 73, along with some additions to Esther and Daniel. So, the seven books found in Catholic Bibles but not Protestant Bibles are: Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and Wisdom of Solomon.
So, why do Catholic Bibles have these additional books? Firstly, the Apostles in the New Testament quoted from the Greek Septuagint, which contained these seven books. And the early Church Fathers read for and cited these books as scripture. And most importantly, the Church in the 4th century, which compiled the Bible, recognized these books as the word of God. So, if Protestants do not trust the Church on the canon of the Old Testament, which included these books, why would they trust it on the 27-book canon of the New?
And finally, these books contain much divine wisdom and prophecies of the Messiah, such as in the Wisdom of Solomon, Chapter 2. Now, a common pushback from Protestant apologists is that the Reformers didn't remove seven books from the Bible, but that the Catholic Church added them at the Council of Trent in 1546. This is of course historically false. The Council of Florence affirmed the same canon a century earlier, and the 4th-century councils on the biblical canon, such as the Council of Rome in 382, the Council of Hippo in 393, and the Council of Carthage in 397, all affirmed the exact same canon that Catholics hold to today. What the Council of Trent did was dogmatically reaffirm the original canon of scripture in response to Martin Luther's removal of seven books. It did not add or subtract anything from the canon.
Another common objection is that the New Testament never directly quotes from the seven books, but it's unclear how this would imply that they're not the word of God. The New Testament doesn't quote from many other books in the Old Testament, including Judges, Ruth, Ezra, Esther, and Song of Solomon. Moreover, the New Testament alludes to the seven books in many places, even if it doesn't directly quote them.
Another argument is that Jews don't recognize the seven books of scripture, so Christians shouldn't either. But why would Christians be obligated to hold to the rabbinic authority of the Jews? Jews don't accept any of the books of the New Testament, yet Protestants are fine accepting them as God's word. Moreover, there is no historical evidence that Jews collectively, before or during the time of Christ, held to a single canon of the Old Testament. Even in the Gospels, you have the Pharisees and Sadducees who held to different biblical canons.
St. Justin Martyr, a prominent Church Father in the 100s, tells us that the Jews began to remove books from the Old Testament because they confirmed the messiahship of Jesus. "But I am far from putting reliance in your teachers, who refused to admit that the interpretation by the seventy elders who were with Ptolemy, king of the Egyptians, is a correct one, and attempted to frame another. And I wish you to observe that they have altogether taken away many scriptures from the translations effected by the seventy elders, who were with Ptolemy, and by which this very man Christ, who was crucified, is proved to have been set forth expressly as God and man, and as being crucified and his dying."
It's also stated that the seven books were disputed in the early church, but many other books in the Protestant canon, such as Esther, Ecclesiastes, Hebrews, and Revelation, were also disputed in the early church. The mere disputation over the inspiration of a book does not disqualify it from being scripture. Some Protestants also argue that the seven books are not in scripture because they were originally composed in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic. But that's a non sequitur. The entire New Testament was composed in Greek and is still the word of God. God isn't obligated to inspire scripture in any one language. On top of that, we've discovered manuscripts of Tobit and Sirach in Hebrew and Aramaic in the Dead Sea Scrolls, disproving the long-standing notion that they were originally Greek texts.
And finally, the seven books were removed by Martin Luther because they contradicted Protestant doctrine. For example, praying for the dead in 2 Maccabees 12, which formed the basis for the doctrine of purgatory and indulgences. Luther also attempted to remove several books from the New Testament, such as the Epistle of James, because it contradicted his doctrine of *sola fide*, or salvation by faith alone. He said, "St. James's Epistle is really an epistle of straw, for it has nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it." It's ironic that the man championed by Protestants as a defender of the Bible attempted to discredit it and succeeded in removing several books from it because they agreed with the Catholic Church.
And lastly, I left Protestantism due to its lack of historic continuity. In Matthew 16, Jesus established the church and said the gates of hell would not prevail against it, which means that the church must exist perpetually in all ages. But Protestantism began in the 16th century and lacks historical or theological continuity with the church founded by Christ and the Apostles. Where was the Protestant church between the 1st and 15th centuries? As Cardinal Newman famously said, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant."
To cope with the fact that Protestantism was rooted in history, the Reformers invented the idea of the invisible church, which is a theory that the true church is an invisible body of believers composed of Christians existing in various denominations, as opposed to a unified visible institution founded by Jesus Christ. But such a notion has no basis in scripture or early Christian tradition. And true to its nature, Protestantism continues to reform and evolve away from its traditional roots and could hardly be called the pillar and bulwark of truth, as the true church is described in 1 Timothy 3:15.
So, those are my five reasons for leaving Protestantism. Based on the five reasons I've listed, here are five questions I have for my Protestant friends. If anyone is able to adequately answer any or all of the five questions, I'd be happy to reconsider Protestantism. And the purpose of this video is not to offend anyone, but simply to share my experience and perspective as a former Protestant. Thank you for watching.