ENGAGING WITH PROTESTANTS Compiled Notes Ben Rahimi SLIDE: WHATS THE - PDF document

SLIDE: WHO ARE WE TALKING TO? THE BASICS AND THE FIVE SOLAE ENGAGING WITH PROTESTANTS Compiled Notes – Ben Rahimi

SLIDE: WHAT’S THE POINT? Reunion is not an option or an extra, it is as much a part of the gospel, or a corollary of the gospel, as social ethics is. If a Christian is a little Christ (an extremely little Christ), he or she must feel agony over the fact that the world, looki ng at Christians, no longer says “Look how they love one another!” but “Look how they contradict each other” and even “Look how they hate each other” – although we have made very significant progress on that latter issue in the last generation or two, which has to be the starting point for progress on the former issue. Christians see (or try to see) what Christ sees. He sees His beloved children fighting among themselves, and this causes Him far more agony than it causes us. His Mother too: mothers are especially sensitive to their children fighting. The Bible (the common absolute authority for both Catholics and Protestants) is very clear about God’s attitude toward denominationalism: Cf. Jn 17. And St. Paul has zero tolerance for it (e.g. I Cor. 1). Anyone, Protestant or Catholic, who accepts the current situation as normal and natural or even inevitable, is not reading the right Book. 1 “No Christian, however, should be satisfied with these forms of communion. They do not correspond to the will of Christ, and weaken his Church in the exercise of its mission. The grace of God has impelled members of many Churches and ecclesial Communities, especially in the course of this present century, to strive to overcome the divisions inherited from the past and to build anew a communion of love by prayer, by repentance and by asking pardon of each other for sins of disunity past and present, by meeting in practical forms of cooperation and in theological dialogue. These are the aims and activities of what has come to be called the ecumenical movement .” – Vatican Document: “Principles and Norms of Ecumenism” 1 https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/05/15/what-can-catholics-and-protestants-learn-from-each- another-2/

CATHOLIC FOR A REASON – ENGAGING PROTESTANTS TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE – HOW TO USE THIS DOCUMENT ………… .. ………………………….. 4 WHO ARE WE TALKING TO?...................................................................................5-9 WHAT ’S WITH THE POPE?............... ....................................................................10-16 SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION ………………………………………………….. .17-26 FAITH AND WORKS ……………………………………………………………... .27-36 THE SACRAMENTS ……………………………………………………………… .37-53 MARY/SAINTS/PRIESTHOOD …………………………………………………… 54-64 WHAT WILL IT MEAN TO HAVE UNITY?......................................................... 65-66 WHY DO CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANTS BIBLES DIFFER?........................67-72 WHY CATHOLICS CALL PRIESTS “FATHER”…………………………………73 -76 CATHOLICISM IS A PERVERSION OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY ………… ......77-78 IS BAPTISM ONLY SYMBOLIC?................................................................................79 SAVED BY “FAITH ALONE”?.............................................................................. ..80-86 ONCE SAVED, ALWAYS SAVED?.............................................................................87 DOCTRINE VS DISCIPLINE ……………………………………………………… .88-89 THE QUESTION OF PURGATORY ……………………………………………….90 -93

HOW TO USE THIS DOCUMENT Dear reader, If you are perusing this monstrosity of a document, thanks for your interest. This document is intended to act as an accompaniment to the slides for “Catholic for a Reason – Engaging Protestants” or as a resource document that you can go to for spec ific questions you might have. It is not intended to be read cover to cover. My hope is that this document will provide you with the resources you need for your conversations with our brothers and sisters in Christ who desire an encounter with the Truth, Jesus Christ. Too often, our desire is to get our Protestant friends to join the “ Catholic Club ” as if we were trying to recruit from one team to another team. This cannot be how we speak. Our conversations with those outside the Catholic Church should always come from a desire for them to fully know Jesus and from the knowledge that to know Jesus in the most intimate way is to know him in the Eucharist, i.e., in his body, blood, soul, and divinity present to us and given to you and I so that we might grow in our faith, hope, and love. If the common ground between us and our Protestant brethren is a love for Jesus and a desire to know him even more deeply, then showing our brothers and sisters how deeply the Eucharist transforms our lives, to show them how much deeper the relationship with Jesus can go, can be the tinder for sparking the desire to know Jesus in his fullness within the Catholic Church. So, long story short, our evangelization must be Eucharistic in nature. Finally, some brief notes about the document and the sources: 1) Very little of this document is my own work. Maybe 15 of the 94 pages are my own writing. That being said, I have not meticulously cited works as I would in an academic work instead opting to just give you the links to the works themselves. 2) The sources for the information in this document are provided in three places: a. In the footnotes of certain pages b. At the top of a new section c. At the end of a section where I list all the resources I used as well as additional resources you can use 3) The table of contents sections are linked to their corresponding sections. I am grateful to God for your desire to evangelize and for your interest in learning more about our Protestant brothers and sisters as well as about our own Catholic faith. Working towards Christian unity is one of the most important missions in our increasingly secular age. It will only be through a unified, Eucharistic, and apostolic witness that the Gospel of Jesus Christ will be at its most fruitful and powerful testimony. In Christ, Benjamin Rahimi

SLIDE: WHO ARE WE TALKING TO? THE BASICS AND THE FIVE SOLAE 1) By the time of Martin Luther’s death, there were already 280 new split denominations from his original split. a. To try and get into all of the particulars of each ecclesial communities and churches is impossible in this short presentation and would, in fact, not do justice to the nuances of belief amongst our Christian brothers and sisters. This would reduce all the different communities to some generic Protestant genus and would not allow for real discussion and argument if we are not speaking about what the actually hold. 2) Ecclesial Community = A Christian community with non-apostolic origins. a. Ecclesial from the Greek ‘ekklesia’ --- ’church’ b. Christian Communities that do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Holy Orders c. Christian Communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery d. This is NOT to say that Protestants are not Christian 3) The fullness of the Church of Jesus Christ can trace itself back to apostolic origins, e.g., the Orthodox Church, Armenian Church, Coptic Church, Roman Catholic Church, etc. 4) All four marks of the Church (first affirmed in the Nicene Creed of 325 AD) were compromised to a greater or lesse r extent by the “reformers” of the Reformation: a. One (Eucharistic unity is broken after the Reformation) b. Holy (The “wholeness” of the Body of Christ is ruptured , different view of the sacraments and different version of Scripture) c. Catholic (no longer universal or independent) d. Apostolic (Pope, Apostolic Succession, Priesthood) 5) However vague and indefinite the creed of individual Protestants may be, it always rests on a few standard rules, or principles, bearing on the Sources of faith, the means of justification, and the constitution of the Church. An acknowledged Protestant authority, Philip Schaff (in "The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge", s.v. Reformation), sums up the principles of Protestantism in the following words: a. “ The Protestant goes directly to the Word of God for instruction, and to the throne of grace in his devotions; whilst the pious Roman Catholic consults the teaching of his church, and prefers to offer his prayers through the medium of the Virgin Mary and the saints. From this general principle of Evangelical freedom, and direct individual relationship of the believer to Christ, proceed the three fundamental doctrines of Protestantism — the absolute supremacy of (1) the Word, and of (2) the grace of Christ, and (3) the general priesthood of believers. ” 6) The Five Solae of the Reformation a. Sola Gratia: i. Salvation is the free gift of God to man. It is given by God’s Grace alone and not through any merit on the part of the Christian.