The other day an evangelical posed some questions about our conversion to Catholicism. My wife and I are always very happy to chat about this, but the questions were more like rapid-fire statements than questions. And on more than one occasion, the beginnings of an answer were prematurely shut down with the exclamation, “That isn’t biblical!” The topics included confession to a priest, praying to the saints, and the worship of Mary. I’ve elsewhere addressed the first, but the latter two will be addressed below. This progression has been characteristic of a number of discussions I have had with my evangelical brothers and sisters. And what repeatedly strikes me is: (1) an unwillingness to listen and have a genuine conversation, and (2) a lack of awareness that does not realize that any Protestant who has become Catholic will have dealt with such questions. Of course, not all evangelicals are like this, so don’t be this type of evangelical.
When my son was young, he could not understand the allure of a woman, and he communicated this in no uncertain terms. You know, girls have cooties. I told him that he will likely change his mind someday once he grows, and he looked at me with skepticism, as if I just couldn’t understand. Although he technically knew that I too had been young once, he hadn’t yet fully grasped that I had been just where he was.
But in such a situation, what can really be said to him? As any mature person can appreciate, he did not possess the experiences, maturity, or insight to properly evaluate the situation for what it was. He was simply not going to “buy it” until he matured.
I find my discussions with many evangelicals to be just like that. These dear brothers and sisters forget (most people who ask already know) that I have walked in the very same theological shoes. Yet they look at me in the same way my son looked at me. And like my son’s youthful failure to comprehend why he might someday change his mind about the desirability of women, many evangelicals do not (yet) possess the (theological) experiences, maturity, and insight to understand me when I say, “someday you may change your mind.” Another way to say it is that they lack the historical, theological, and linguistic experience to recognize the situation for what it is. Nor do they see that one of the root causes of evangelicalism’s apostasy is the same reason why Catholicism makes for the best option. And one symptom of this is the failure to think deeply about what “being biblical” means.
But unlike with my son, who did not yet have the biological experiences that would prompt maturity, the immaturity of these evangelicals often lies in a failure of virtue—the virtues of humility and teachableness. Because those require really listening—taking the time to understand. Humility also acknowledges that we are not so smart as we think we are, that the pursuit of truth isn’t so easy as we’d like it to be, and that the interpretation of Scripture isn’t as straightforward as we want it to be.
Instead of really listening, these folks say things very much like the child’s insistence that girls have cooties: “that’s not biblical!”; “the Bible doesn’t teach that”; “that’s against Scripture!” The problem is that, although both responses may owe to a lack of maturity, the emphatic declarations of the child do not owe to a tragic myopia. Unlike the evangelical, the child does not yet have the necessary reservoir of emotions and experiences to draw from. He has no real choice in the matter because he hasn’t reached a point where this is even possible. The evangelical, on the other hand, makes an intentional choice not to listen well. Therefore, the issue is ultimately one of self-deception. In other words, the child may be forgiven for their immaturity in a way the evangelical may not.
But it is not as though I have no compassion for my evangelical brethren. I do. I was one, and I have a special compassion for them, and I dedicate a lot of time to trying to help them mature. And in fairness to them, there is a theological presupposition within American Christianity that hardens rather than softens the disconnect they see between Scripture and Catholicism. I have written about it elsewhere, but I call it the “democratization of Christianity” because that is essentially what it is. And I’ve realized, over the course of many conversations with my evangelical brethren, that these theological commitments are fundamentally influencing their ability to have productive conversations about the history and essence of the very faith they claim to be theirs. And it should also be said firmly that many educated evangelicals are not immature, so this is not a Catholic vs. Protestant topic so much as a plea to evangelicals who fail to appreciate that Catholicism represents a different interpretation of what Scripture is and what it says.
So what is meant by “biblical”? One common evangelical answer to this question is something akin to this: “unless the terms be explicitly condoned within Scripture, it must be rejected”. Such a definition is a non-starter. If it were true that the terms used in English parlance must themselves be present in Scripture, Christian activities like home-schooling, denominational monikers (e.g., Lutheranism, Methodism, Presbyterianism, or Baptist), and specific church names (e.g., Lakepointe, First Baptist, or Covenant Church) would not be “biblical” and would necessarily be rejected. What do I mean? Take common church names. They may seem to be “biblical” because they may incorporate words or phrases from Scripture, but upon this basis, I could call my church “First Church of Satan”, “Assembly of Babylon”, or “Jezebel’s Sanctuary”. Although such names are unlikely to draw a crowd, by the criterion set forth, they are just as “biblical” as the others.
Or take denominational names like “Presbyterianism” or “Baptist”. Unlike “Lutheran” and “Methodist”, which have no terminological attestation within Scripture, these monikers are at least transliterations of Greek terms found in the New Testament. The former is an Anglicized and nominalized form of the Greek word for “elder”, the intention being to signal an “elder-run” church governance. The latter is the term for an action that involves water, the idea being that Baptist expressions of the faith treat baptism differently than other denominations (i.e., they immerse believers). But neither term in Scripture refers to a style of church. By what precedent do we repurpose a word used in one way and make it stand for our distinctives? Are we not putting our disunity on full display in the very terms we use to describe ourselves?
More relevant to my point here, is this reconditioned (i.e., non-biblical) use of biblical terms a big deal? Not really, no. Why not? Because most people recognize that the term “biblical” cannot mean that every word we use to describe Christian beliefs and practice must be present within Scripture and used in the same form and manner in which we find it. In my view, there should actually be greater fidelity in this regard, but let it not be said that Catholics alone are guilty of this.
The appeal to terms in Scripture doesn’t make something “biblical”. Strewn across history are examples of heretics who took terms from Scripture and imbued them with a meaning different from what the church understood it to mean. Same with ideas and/or phrases. For example, “this is my body” means something very different to the typical evangelical than it does for the Catholic. Moreover, some non-biblical terms better capture the biblical testimony than Scripture itself. The term “Trinity” more precisely captures the essence of the divine person that Scripture communicates in Matt. 28 and many other places, yet it isn’t found in the New Testament (since it is of Latin provenance). Yet it delineates between Christian orthodoxy and heresy in a helpful and essential way. We simply cannot do without it.
So if it isn’t consonance of terminology by which we recognize whether or not something is “biblical”, what is it? In light of such realizations, a revised principle might read, “unless an idea be explicitly condoned or modeled within Scripture, it must be rejected.” Although this sounds more reasonable, it is neither sufficient nor helpful for unity-building discussions. One reason is because there are ranges of meaning for (and therefore interpretations of) the terms “explicit”, “condoned”, “modeled”, and “rejected”.
For example, we might be forced to reject Sunday School: this activity isn’t condoned or modeled in Scripture. It is, however, a merger of the intention to fulfill the Scriptural mandate of catechesis (i.e., teaching) with the conviction that this can happen on the Lord’s day when and where people have already gathered.
And we might also be prohibited from attending church on Sundays. Scripture is not unequivocal about the matter, which propagates the disagreement between Seventh-Day Adventists and the rest of the church. The alleged “models” for Sunday worship (e.g., Acts 20:7) may simply refer to less formal gatherings. Or take 1 Cor. 16:2, which counsels setting aside money each Sunday. Although highly likely that the context of communal worship earlier in the epistle also applies to what Paul says about setting aside an offering on the first day of each week (i.e., Sundays), we cannot be certain of it. At the very same time, neither can we accept the Seventh-Day Adventist position, as it suffers from worse biblical difficulties. Moreover, a Sunday in our time and region of the world may not actually be a Sunday according to the original Jewish calendar or the calendar that Jesus and the apostles used. See this article about how complicated the problem is. But is this a problem for Sunday worship? No, not really. Why not? Because the problem isn’t that we lack textual precedent for worship activities on Sunday nor whether accurate calculations for identifying Sundays have been made. The problem is with our principle: no precedent or model is clearly condoned in Scripture. As a related problem, in some cases multiple models may be condoned.
By way of another example, take your favorite version of the Bible, say, the King James Version. There is no personality in Scripture who goes by the name King James. There is no overt authorization to translate the Bible, let alone any principles for how to do it. So how do we get there? From the historical evidence, we know that the Old Testament (Hebrew) Scriptures were being translated into Greek and Latin and that our authors themselves spoke other languages. We can reason that Greek was chosen as the language of the New Testament for its proliferative effects. We know the mandate to baptize and teach all nations. Yet nowhere is there any explicit command to translate and keep translating the Scriptures. These justifications are derived from the realm of reasonable inferences or from disciplines like history, linguistics, and textual criticism—all of which are sourced in the mind of people.
Must we reject Bible translation (and our versions) since there is no model for it within Scripture? No. Because the problem here isn’t Bible translation but the failure to recognize that an activity doesn’t have to be explicitly authorized in Scripture to be “biblical”. All Christians string together various propositions or man-made observations from Scripture (or theology, history, linguistics, etc.) to justify their practices. And let’s be clear: they can and should. The real question is: how, as a community, ought we to establish the proper limits of this human activity? In other words, activities not overtly authorized in Scripture aren’t necessarily “unbiblical”, if by the word we mean untrue or running against the testimony of Scripture.
As it turns out, it is difficult to define exactly what “biblical” means without having to make many qualifications or falling under the allegation of inconsistency. The truth is that all Christian communities are appealing to different models and making different determinations about what Scripture means. They are all relying upon various rational, theological, historical, and linguistic considerations in the derivation of those practices. In light of this, I simply propose that a simpler rubric for using the terms “biblical” and “unbiblical”, and that we all pay careful attention to how these terms get used. Here are four domains (D1-D4) to which our terms may be applied:
- what Scripture prescribes
- what Scripture proscribes
- what Scripture references but neither prescribes nor proscribes
- what Scripture does not address
In conversations where the terms “biblical” and “unbiblical” (or “not biblical”) are thrown around, my evangelical brethren usually mean by the former something that is “true” or “consistent with the testimony Scripture”, and by the latter something that is “untrue” or “running counter to the testimony of Scripture” (i.e., prescribing something proscribed or vice versa). I will not quibble over these meanings when used in this way. However, we must draw attention when they get used in ways that confuse those in conversation by conflating or changing the above domains. What do I mean?
The term “biblical” is generally supposed to refer to domains (1) and (2), and “unbiblical” to things that conflict with domains (1) and (2). Take: “Thou shall not have any idol before me.” It’s technically a prohibition (domain 2), and so we might say that a Christian conviction or practice is “biblical” if its outworking keeps God in the place of prime importance (i.e., both Catholics and Protestants exclusively reserve the term “worship” for God alone). And a conviction or practice would be “unbiblical” if it allowed idolatry or the worship of anything that was not God. I will defer to evangelical parlance here.
The problem, however, is that my evangelical brethren too often use the term “biblical” to include domain (3) and the term “unbiblical” to reject domain (4). And many times they fail to grasp that there is disagreement about what belongs in domains (1) and (2). And they frequently do not recognize when there is unexplored linguistic terrain in play.
So let’s enumerate the five categories (C1-C5) of problems that frequent Catholic-evangelical discussions and consider a couple use cases in light of them:
- Failure to really listen
- Use the term “biblical” to include domain (3)
- Use the term “unbiblical” to reject domain (4)
- Failure to acknowledge disagreements about what falls within domains (1) and (2)
- Failure to recognize unexplored linguistic terrain
Let’s take the “worship” of Mary. My friend challenged the practice of worshipping Mary. Despite insisting that no informed Catholic worships Mary, and that we would agree that the “worship” of Mary is “unbiblical” (D2), he insisted that this was part of Catholic belief (C1). The reason probably owes to the lack of recognition that we have not settled which actions or beliefs should be considered “worship” (C5). The real issue is the Catholic veneration of Mary. For some evangelicals it encroaches on the domain of worship and is therefore “unbiblical” (C4). For others, they just don’t see any precedent in Scripture, so they reject it. The working assumption is to do nothing that Scripture does not authorize. And while I’ve tried to demonstrate above that this principle is unsustainable, my problem here isn’t with the principle but with calling this veneration “unbiblical”. This represents the confusion of domains to which I’m pointing. It is rejecting a Christian practice that Scripture does not overtly address (again, C3). Now, I could go into reasons why Scripture indirectly endorses this, but I am only concerned here with making this argument: let’s keep our domains straight and avoid these categorical problems in discussion.
Let’s now look at praying to saints. My friend called it “unbiblical” and therefore rejected it out of hand. But the same basic problems are in play here. There was a failure to recognize that the term “prayer” can mean “talk” or “beseech” (and doesn’t imply any worship) (C5). There was the failure to acknowledge disagreements about the extent to which Scripture itself promotes and exemplifies the great cloud of witnesses seeing, hearing, and doing things (C4). And even if we granted (which we shouldn’t) that no single example or precedent exists within Scripture of praying to a saint, we still should not call it “unbiblical” because it would then technically belong to that domain of topics unaddressed by Scripture (D4). And we shouldn’t use the term “unbiblical” to reject a practice that is not inarguably present within Scripture because what is meant by the word is that it runs contrary to what Scripture says, which is clearly not the case. All the while the failure to listen (C1) stymies discussion and prevents any conceptual rapprochement. Like two lonely ships passing in the night…
In summary, my plea to evangelicals who wish to ask Catholics converts (from Protestantism) about these practices is: be willing to listen, be careful about how you use the terms “biblical” and “unbiblical”, and note that you really need to do these things for your own sake. These converts have already worked through both these terminological issues and theological presuppositions. If the wisdom (not the canonical status) of Sirach may be heard: “Never speak against the truth, but be ashamed of your ignorance” (NRSV). Let this help us all grow in those essential virtues of humility and teachability.