Protestant or Catholic?
I
THAT ardent Protestant before Protestantism, Saint Francis of Assisi, standing humbly before the great Pope Innocent, defended his wandering brothers, preaching without license, bringing souls to God although possessed of no grace of ordination. ‘ The King of Kings,’ said he, ‘ has told me that He will provide for all the sons which He may have of me, for, if He sustains bastards, how much more His legitimate sons.’ In other words, these liberty-loving troubadours of God were lawful sons of the Gospel. They challenged the clergy — nay, even the Pope himself— to question their claim. They were as typical of what Protestantism means as was Luther in that more famous scene when, at the Diet of Worms, he challenged the world of his day.
For Protestantism, like Catholicism, is far more an attitude than a system, far more a way of approaching fundamental realities than a formulated doctrine. It is tied up to-day in our popular view with those movements for the reformation of the Church which took shape in the sixteenth century. Something of its meaning has been crystallized in them. Something of its spirit has, as must always happen, been lost in the process.
But the thing itself, the attitude toward God, and what we call, vaguely, spiritual values, is vital and imperishable. It lives in Saint Paul; it withdraws from the world in monasticism; it refreshes the world in Saint Francis; it breaks the cultural unity of Europe in Luther and Calvin and the other reformers. And when to-day it is challenged as having done its work or lost its power, it flames again. Indeed, it is astonishing, in view of the generally easygoing tolerance toward religious differences, how hot the flame can burn.
England was surprised six years ago at the outburst in Parliament over the proposed new Prayer Book. And so (to come to the occasion of this paper) I take it many good American Episcopalians were surprised at the reaction when the proposal was made at their recent General Convention to drop the word ‘Protestant’ from the official title of their Church, known for a century and a half as the Protestant Episcopal Church. There was an unsuspected depth of conviction on the part of those who opposed the change. It seemed a small matter. The word was rarely used in the popular designation of the Church. Why trouble about it?
The reason cannot be clear without some suggestion of the historic backgrounds and some attempt to catch the meaning of these elusive and illdefined attitudes which we know as Catholic and Protestant. It is their meaning which gives this small denominational matter some claim to general interest. Let me begin by pointing the contrast.
The Catholic sees religion as a collective social matter. He is an institutionalist. He lays great stress on order, regularity, and tradition. He feels the importance of the outward and visible instruments and agencies of religion and easily becomes a sacramentalist. The importance of the institution creates faith in its authority. The visible Church, the organ of authority, is the sign and pledge of all spiritual growth. It is easy for him to hand over his life into the keeping of the Church and accept a director of his conscience. The institutional Church becomes the very centre of his religious outlook. He dare not separate himself from it. He is in matters ecclesiastical a conservative. His watchword is authority.
The Protestant approaches the whole matter in another way. Religion is his own individual concern. He has found direct personal access to God. Often he cares little for order and regularity and less for tradition. He sets store by personal inspiration and guidance. The Church is the fellowship of believers, but its authority is moral. It guides but does not rule. Its sacraments are symbols that touch and fire faith; not inevitable channels of grace. To be in the communion of the Church is a part of the Christian inheritance; but if the Church starves the soul, it can no longer claim allegiance. Personal access to God is the very centre of the Protestant’s religious outlook. He is in matters ecclesiastical a liberal. His watchword is freedom.
Contrasts of this kind never tell the whole truth. The Christian world is not divided into two kinds of people sharply distinguished. These two attitudes slip over one into the other. In the memorable conference on the Faith and Order of the Church held at Lausanne in 1927, at which every great Church save the Roman Catholic was represented, the contrast was vivid. The Catholic mind seemed embodied in the dignified Easterners whose theology was as traditional as their garments; the Protestant mind in the restless Americans in their business suits urging prompt action. But no one could say where one type ended and the other began. Orthodox and Anglicans, Lutherans and Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists and Disciples and Baptists — it was a great multicolored gathering drawn from all the world. One could classify historically this or that group as Protestant or Catholic, but Catholic Anglicans found Scotch Presbyterians or High Church Lutherans closer to them than many of their own colleagues, and the ‘notes’ of Catholicism or Protestantism were found in unexpected quarters.
That is really inevitable. Authority and freedom are the two foci of all social evolution. Neither has its full value without the other. Even were it possible to draw a line of cleavage, one could not wish it drawn. Spiritual impulses, like all other springs of action, embody themselves in institutions; but institutions need the perpetual revivifying power of new impulses. Otherwise they go dead.
II
Now the Reformation which gave us the word ‘Protestant’ had multitudinous aspects, but essentially one underlying principle. It purposed to reform religion as religion was then known in Europe, but that meant to bring back to the individual his own responsibility for himself. The superstitions which were attacked, the miracles which became objects of jest, the sacramental doctrines which were swept away, were essentially all methods by which the Church — not exempt from the temptations of all institutions, although perhaps rarely conscious of the direction it was taking — had increased its control of the individual life and thereby its prestige and power. In the sacramental system, in the miracles which healed and the petty superstitions which ensured progress toward salvation, it was reaching out, surrounding but ultimately submerging the individual. Its wealth and power grew — until at last came the revolt, and modern Protestantism was born. Souls which sought freedom, souls which knew the direct access to God, souls set on fire by the Spirit, would no longer endure the shackles put upon them.
The Protestant Reformation might have ended as did many an effort of monasticism for reform. It might have made, like Saint Francis and the friars, a real impression upon the life of the Church without breaking its unity. It might have suffered the disastrous fate of the Lollards in England. Another destiny might have been that of Luther and Calvin and the rest, had it not been that Europe was already swept by a great tide of individualism. New learning, new continents, new industries, new nations, made a world as bewildering as that of to-day. Traditions and customs were changing. The rock-like bases of mediæval life were being shaken. Men were thrown upon themselves. They found a sudden and vast enthusiasm as they contemplated their own powers and saw their own achievements. It was a marvelous age. It broke up the unity of European culture — a great loss; but it found freedom — a great gain, and essential for the centuries to come.
The religious reformation was part of this larger movement of the human soul. It was reënforced by it, and the result was that the two age-long attitudes toward the Christian faith, instead of continuing their real though precarious and uneasy relationship within the one body separated in great areas of Christendom, crystallized and came into antagonism. The separation made official Catholicism more Catholic. It made official Protestantism more Protestant. It made it harder for a Francis and a John Woolman to understand one another. It led on the one hand to the logical conclusion of Papal Infallibility and on the other to the notion that any man’s religion is as good as any other’s, because any man has direct access to God and is quite capable of reading the Scriptures and understanding God’s purposes.
The latter, by the way, is a perfect reflection in the religious sphere of the naïve assumptions of early American democracy concerning everyman’s capacity for government.
It is at this point that we ‘Anglicans’ (members of the Church of England or her daughter churches) come forward, I hope with due modesty, but with a very definite faith that we have a real contribution to make to the tangled and divided Christian world. ‘By the greatest of all misfortunes,’ says Professor Menegoz, ‘the Church was overestimated in Catholicism and underestimated by the Protestants; and that without anyone on either side having succeeded up to the present in restoring that fine balance of forces which in the earliest Christian society had made of the Church the body of the spirit of Christ at once one and multiple.’ Perhaps, say we Anglicans, we have not succeeded in perfect adjustment of the balance, but that, at any rate, is what we are striving to do.
The Church of England during the terrific struggles of the Reformation period became ardently Protestant, but never surrendered or intended to surrender its full Catholic heritage. It cleansed itself of those developments of worship and doctrine which hampered the free access to God. It repudiated the alien authority of the Pope. It associated itself frankly with the Reformed movements on the continent of Europe. But it preserved its Catholic orders or polity, its Catholic liturgy, and its recognition of the ‘authority’ of the Universal Church acting in council. It set its Protestant position against a Catholic background; but it was none the less Protestant, standing for freedom, for spontaneity, for the prophet’s place in the life of the Church, and, as the centuries have gone on, for a democratic Church in which laymen as well as clergy have a voice.
The Anglican Communion has never thought of this as a compromise, although again and again, as in the first English Prayer Books, compromises have been necessary to give free play to both movements in the Church.
It is rather a synthesis. It brings both together under the larger category of the fundamental faith. Or, to put it in another way, it is an experiment in the interests of a larger conception of Catholicism. The Church has succeeded, with fine lack of consistency, in somehow or other repudiating any ‘sect idea’ which would carry with it the attempt to restrict Christian experience to one particular type. In the long story of four centuries there have been, I know, many failures. The worst was the failure to understand John Wesley. The Methodist schism was the sad result. But it stands to-day upon the principle which guided the early post-Reformation settlements, and with clearer vision than ever before moves along its difficult path trying to keep the balance, or, using the other figure, to preserve the synthesis.
III
What, then, in the light of the foregoing story, was the meaning of the debate in Atlantic City on the name of the Church? It is quite apparent that any such question, even though it concerns directly only one comparatively small Christian Communion, has, as I suggested above, a wide significance. It is a symbol of the struggle which, as we have seen, has brought tension through all the centuries of the Christian Church. It is not the first time that a proposal to change the name of the Episcopal Church has been urged. A hundred years ago the Oxford Movement, of which Newman, who later became a Roman Catholic, was the most distinguished leader, started new currents of life in the somewhat staid and stationary Church of England. Its leaders had a profound conviction of the primary place of the Church in Christian life. They began to bring out into the open the Catholic elements in the standards of the Church of England. They emphasized, as over against the Evangelical or Low Church position, worship, order, the importance of the Sacraments, and the continuity of the Church with the past. They brought the mediæval Church back into view. They helped men to understand better the meaning of that noble word ‘Catholic,’ and to appreciate the value in the life of Christianity of the things it connotes.
They were children, I suppose, of the Romantic movement; but the steady growth of what has come to be called Anglo-Catholicism is obviously closely bound up with the whole economic development of the past century.
As we have seen, the Catholic attitude tends to make religion objective. It sets store by the ‘outward and visible.’ It is at home with vast organization, with mass production, and with the increasing emphasis upon the historic and the beautiful.
Thus for a century the movement which has grown most steadily and moulded most effectively the Church of England has been this vigorous revival of Catholicism. In America, because the Episcopal Church is relatively so much smaller, and I think perhaps especially because this formulated Catholic view of religion has little appeal for the frontier democracy nurtured upon itinerant preaching and the technique of the revival, it has not taken so dominant a place.
But (and here I come to the name again), as was natural, those who have felt so deeply the Catholic heritage have constantly striven to associate the Episcopal Church more and more closely with the Catholic side of Christendom and to separate it more definitely from organized Protestantism. Many of them, it is true, have been leaders in Church Unity movements. I am not referring to brotherly sympathy and interest, but to official relations. Under the guidance of such leaders we have come joyfully and successfully nearer to the great Catholic Churches of the East. We have been of service to scattered groups of Catholic inheritance and have made provision for closer affiliation.
But still to the Catholic-minded Episcopalian that word ‘Protestant’ in our title has seemed a misnomer. It seems to identify us with great groups of Christians who have no Catholic tradition. It seems to say that any man’s view in religion is as good as any other man’s; that, any minister’s commission, though it come only from a little local congregation, is as good as any other’s, though it come from a line reaching back to the Apostles.
And so, from time to time, proposals to get rid of ‘Protestant’ have been made. At first it was hoped that some name including ‘Catholic’ might be found acceptable as a substitute; but there are too many contenders for the title in America. There are Roman Catholics and American Catholics and Liberal Catholics, and I know not how many others. ‘Catholic’ would not do; and this year, as once before twenty-four years ago, the effort was made merely to drop the obnoxious word.
But the trouble is that more than half the Church does not think it is obnoxious at all. There is much to be said in favor of dropping it. It is true that it is often misunderstood. It emphasizes in the name only one element of the synthesis, Episcopal not being equivalent to Catholic. It creates a certain suspicion among the Christian bodies of Catholic tradition with which we have to work. It is an obstacle in some of the missionary fields overseas. It perpetuates an old controversy which, if it exists to-day, has taken on quite new forms. It irks a great number of good Church members. After all, it is only a word. We want to forget the past and go forward together. It was in that spirit, perhaps, that many rather earnest Protestants twenty-four years ago and again this year stood ready to vote a change.
There is (if I may again modestly eulogize my own Church) a fine spirit of brotherliness, of mutual consideration and readiness to see the other’s point of view, among us. We hold views almost as divergent as can be found in Christianity. But we live together and work together and get on remarkably well. We have made a little progress, at any rate, in Christian love; and most of us do know that uniformity of thought is an impossible and undesirable ideal.
But what some of those who favored change overlooked is that considerations of this kind work both ways. To drop the word would be to bring very real and devastating sorrow to the hearts of many. Those who do not like the word have nevertheless managed to live with it. The word is misunderstood; but so is every characterization of this kind. If I call myself ‘Catholic,’ nine out of every ten Americans who do not know me will think that I have leanings toward Rome. We are still proud to be called Americans in spite of the hundred-per-centers and the reputation which banditry and vile movies and a parochially-minded Senate give us abroad. There is not much choice between being identified with ‘Biblebelt’ Fundamentalists and with the numerous and rather weird groups who claim the Catholic name and are often represented by picturesque but somewhat unreliable Episcopi vagrantes. One cannot avoid misunderstanding.
The presence of the word has not prevented and does not prevent our growing relations with the Catholic Communions. If to drop the word is desirable in some missionary fields, it would not be in others.
The opponents of change took pains to emphasize the fact that we were not dealing with the question of a new name. The proposal was to drop a name in use officially for a century and a half, a name which at the time it was chosen was the accepted term for describing the ecclesiastical position of the Church of England and had been for a century or more. And as for ‘ Protestant,’ even Archbishop Laud had proclaimed his faith in ‘the true Protestant religion established in the Church of England.’
IV
But after all, these various considerations did not reach the heart of the matter. ‘Protestant’ is only a word, but it connotes historically a very definite religious attitude. It stands historically, as we have seen, for freedom and the rights of the individual and the simplicity of the Gospel. Did the effort; to get rid of the word also include the effort to get rid of the thing?
The answer seemed to be that it did. The proponents of change represented a movement in the Church which had consistently striven to repudiate its Protestant character. They did not want the word because they did not want the thing. A word can be a safeguard. A symbol is never only a symbol. It has real power, and those who believe in the reality which it expresses do well to cherish it.
That is unmistakably true, I think, in this case. The Anglo-Catholic movement tends, with the inevitableness of all social groups, to its logical conclusions. It tends more and more toward a religion of authority. It becomes increasingly sacramental. In doctrine and practice it approximates constantly those communions which, like the Roman Catholic, are frankly not Protestant. That does not mean that all Anglo-Catholics are in sympathy with these tendencies. Many are not; but they are caught and swept forward in the current. If the Episcopal Church in America or the Anglican Communion permits itself to be caught in that same current, if it repudiates its Protestant heritage, if confession and the Mass and authority come to be the substance of its ecclesiastical language, it has no more significance for the Christian world. Its experiment, daring, far-visioned, and difficult, has failed. It becomes one of the lesser Catholic groups. It set out (not deliberately and with no heroic gesture advertising its purpose) to show the Christian world that Catholic and Protestant are not antitheses, but are susceptible of a larger synthesis. The two factors in the synthesis must always be difficult of adjustment. There must always be tension. Keeping the balance is never easy. But it must be kept.
In this uneasy and tense situation the advantage always rests with the Catholic movement. The Protestant churches all have the same problem. They all tend to become institutionalized, and when they do, freedom suffers. The constituted authorities even in a government dedicated to freedom move toward repression when any crisis threatens, or when, as today, there is much revolutionary talk in the air.
That being the case, even a word, a mere symbol, becomes important. There is no danger to the essential Catholic order of the Episcopal Church. Not even its most radical Protestant member wants to give up bishops and the carefully guarded ordinations of its priests, or to surrender the Prayer Book with its eminently Catholic liturgical forms, or its belief in its responsibility toward universal Christianity. There is no great danger in that direction. There is in the other. Freedom in Church or State is always in peril, authority only in crises.
But it was not only as a symbol of its position as reformed and Protestant that the Church retained the word. We have made great progress in our closer relations with the Catholic bodies, but, except in the growing friendliness of feeling, little progress toward unity in our relations with the frankly Protestant world; and yet that world is our world. Our view of life, of the function of religion and the relation of religion to public affairs, is essentially the same as that of all our nearer Protestant neighbors. Our culture is a distinctly Protestant culture. We belong to what a recent writer has called ‘the Protestant Garrison’ of America. The Catholic conception of Church and State, as illustrated in the greatest of Catholic communions, is quite alien to our familiar and everyday attitude. The problem of reunion with these other Protestant churches is forced upon us daily. We coöperate with them in many important undertakings. We are affiliated with the Federal Council of Churches, although not a full member. We work together as full members in great numbers of local federations and associations. All intelligent Protestant leaders understand that we have not only ardent Catholic-minded members but a definite Catholic order; but, if our friendly coöperation is to move on to unity, they must be likewise assured that we mean a Catholicism which is definitely Protestant.
To have dropped the word ‘Protestant’ would not necessarily have included surrendering our Protestant heritage; but for the cause of unity it was of vital importance that there should be no doubt of our position. It is another case where symbols count.
V
One more consideration seems worth mentioning. It takes one rather far afield from ecclesiastical matters, but the interaction of religion and social life makes it important. Current literature is full of comment on the decline of democracy. The totalitarian State and the rise of dictatorships seem to have made an end of it. They have not. There is really no danger of its ultimate extinction. It arose through the recognition of the worth of the individual, and as long as men believe in themselves they will fight for freedom.
Christianity means, or ought to mean, exactly that. It is a religion of the spirit, a religion of freedom, but it is Protestantism which has kept that alive and made the spiritual background for American as well as English democracy.
American and English Catholics, whether Anglican or Roman, do not, I am sure, for the most part want a totalitarian state. They too want freedom. But an authoritative Church, particularly if it has become an absolutist Church, is ultimately incompatible with free democracy. It cannot release and nurture those springs of action which issue in political and economic freedom. The absolutist Church is congruous only with the absolutist State, a proposition which will seem eminently debatable to some, but which lies beyond the scope of this paper. Whether or not that proposition be true, it is certainly true that the background of our freedom is Protestant. If our liberties are menaced (and they are), it behooves us to keep alive and fresh and powerful their spiritual sources.
What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? Is it that the need at this moment of vigorous Protestantism in Church and State means that we must choose one alternative of the question posed at the beginning of this paper and exclude the other?
The Episcopal Church answers, ‘ By no means!’ In the words of one of the reports presented at the Lambeth Conference of 1930, ‘We humbly believe that when in God’s good providence the Church Universal now divided is finally brought together in the unity which is His will, the foundation of this unity will be the freedom based upon common fundamental beliefs which has ever been our heritage.’
The answer to the question, ‘Protestant or Catholic?’ is neither Protestant nor Catholic, but both.