Why Save Protestantism?

No man is a better guide to straight thinking than St. Augustine. Fourteen centuries ago he lived in a world more like our own than any intervening century has been like our times. Heathenism was not wholly gone, by any means. The Vandals were on the ramparts of the old empire and fast crumbling its shaky defenses. The Christian church was newly out of hiding, and proliferating amid the cross-currents of thought which have always marked the greatest enterprises. Paul the Apostle found “fears within and fightings without.” Augustine pointed out the uneven stones in the holy edifice of the Church as described in Bible times: David’s family history; a traitor in our Lord’s own select band; and revolution in heaven itself when the angels fell.

Augustine wrote a letter in A.D. 397 in which he gave a wise caution: “Though the doctrine which men hold be false and perverse, if they do not maintain it with passionate obstinacy, especially when they have not devised it by the rashness of their own presumption, but have accepted it from parents who have been misguided and had fallen into error, and if they are with anxiety seeking the truth, and are prepared to be set right when they have found it, such men are not to be counted heretics.” For his part also hear John Calvin in the opening pages of his fourth book of The Institutes (The Church) where he wrote: “Let us learn from her single title of Mother (i.e., the Church) how useful, nay how necessary the knowledge of her is, since there is no other means of entering into life unless she conceive us in the womb and give us birth, unless she nourish us at her breasts, and, in short, keep us under her charge and government, until, devested of mortal flesh, we become like the angels.”

All areas of the Church have experienced reformations. When our national government was organized the Jesuit Order was under the ban of Rome. Many reform movements occurred before the Reformation. Many reformations have taken place since the Reformation. Probably neither Luther nor Calvin ever conceived that a great body of Christians would claim his name as a title of honor and not simply the name of Jesus Christ. The Catholic Church today has features which would have been like direct answers to the prayers of reformers; notably, the publication of the Bible in English, introduced, with the foreword by the Holy Name Society which quotes a papal invitation to read it daily.

“Protestantism” is too inexact a term, and to “save it” would not secure the Church. The Church is of God’s building, and, with our Lord the Corner Stone, abides. Protestantism has too many fellow-travelers to be a safe defense. The name has a long and honorable history, to be sure. Most reformed Church adherents cheerfully claim it. Its historic and present interest is reformation, and Reformed is, therefore, a better term. For reformation has been the interest of the Church from the beginning. The Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15) was for reform, and the Council of Trent was designed to accomplish reformation. The Reformation was envisaged by its first and greatest leaders as a call to return to the purity of the Church as displayed in Scripture. Reformation is the better word because it pictures the Church abiding more vividly than does the term Protestant, which suggests separation, or even defiance, if not carefully explained. So one turns to Augustine, with a feeling of great confidence. His voluminous writings breathe affection. He talks to opponents as though they were the closest of friends, though differences call for conference and are frankly dealt with.

Five great works by St. Augustine deserve the attention of all men today, especially Catholics and Protestants: The Confessions, Christian Doctrine, Enchiridion (Hand-book) on Faith, Hope and Charity, The Trinity, and The City of God. The world is living like the world of the fourth Christian century. All around is the corruption of decayed secularism. The dying Roman Empire was tremendously modern. Over the horizon is something like the Vandal world, militant, but like that world sheltering the seeds of Christian greatness, as the barbarians of the fourth century brought saints and missionaries for a time then yet to come. Augustine, who lived through one half of the fourth century and one third of the fifth, saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries the arena on which the victorious conquest would march. The future will again become our instructor.

Augustine is an ideal leader for the whole Church today.

1. He has preeminence in Catholic and non-Catholic circles.

2. He made the Scripture his rule, steadfastly exalted its authority and refused to deviate from its voice. “For it seems to me,” he wrote, “that most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books: that is to say, that the men by whom the Scripture has been given to us, and committed to writing, did put down in their books anything false” (letter to Jerome).

3. He personally found God in Christ his Saviour. Like Paul he reached the happy goal after an agonizing search. In short, Augustine was an evangelical man.

4. He was a man of irenic temper. The long conflict with Manichaean, Donatist, and Pelagian controversialists so fully illustrated his love for the Church, his love for his opponents, his desire and effort for unity in the Saviour and fellowship in the Holy Ghost. “… With reference to the minds of those (Pelagians) for whose sake you wished me to write … it is not so much in opposition to my opinion, but, to speak mildly, and not to mention the doctrine of Him who spoke in His apostles, certainly against not only the opinion of the great Apostle Paul, but also his strong, earnest and vigilant conflict, that they prefer maintaining their own opinions with tenacity to listening to him, when he ‘beseeches them by the mercies of God,’ and tells them ‘through the grace of God which was given him’ …” (to Marcellinus).

5. For Augustine the Church was the “congregation of believers.” No name was before that of Christ the Lord. No lobby was tolerated in the courts of the Lord.

All men could turn to Augustine today for good. History, philosophy, theology, and social science are deeply in his debt. Best of all, human hearts will find him a great guide as they ponder his works. Happily at least four of his five principal works can now be had in the paperback edition, an incidental but significant commentary on his readability (The Confessions, The City of God, Christian Doctrine, and the Hand-book, or Enchiridion, on Faith, Hope and Love).—DR. STEWART M. ROBINSON of Delhi, New York, for many years the distinguished editor of The Presbyterian.

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