Why Jason Stellman Has Protestantism Nailed

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 5:52 pm by Scott Eric Alt

Why Jason Stellman Has Protestantism Nailed 2017-03-09T17:52:06-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Here is an article which, if you haven’t read, you should. On his blog Creed Code Cult, Catholic convert and former PCA minister Jason Stellman posts this article on the fundamental paradigm difference between the Catholic Church and the Protestant “ecclesial communities” (to use Benedict XVI’s more accurate description). Mr. Stellman manages to write his article without using the word “paradigm,” but at heart, that is what he is talking about. And you should read it because he flat-out nails it.

Here’s why: Because he says the words that many Catholics have thought but haven’t said; for, to say them will most certainly rankle. But Mr. Stellman says them and lets them stand without either overwought hyperbole or cowering apology.

One thing I have begun to notice—especially after starting to fall in love with G.K. Chesterton about five years ago—is how practically and ecclesiologically atheistic Protestantism seems from a Catholic perspective.

Mr. Stellman is willing to explain what he means by comparing Protestantism with atheism, but he does not backpeddle on the comparison. The gist of the comparison is that Protestantism, historically, has entailed an excision of the supernatural from the Christian imagination. Oh, Protestants believe in supernatural events—when the Bible has recorded them. But outside the context of what Protestants are bound by sola scriptura to believe, the supernatural is nothing better than superstitious:

Yes, Gabriel appeared to the young teenager Mary in the year 9-months BC, but no, Mary did not appear to that young teenaged girl in France in 1858 A.D. Yes, the Holy Spirit took a gaggle of sinful fishermen and protected them from teaching error so that they could pen the New Testament, but no, the Holy Spirit could not possibly have supernaturally protected their successors from teaching error when they continued their ministry of governing the Church that Jesus founded.

That is spot-on in its exposure of the Protestant double-standard on infallibility: We believe that Peter was infallible when he wrote two epistles, but not when he taught as pope. Protestant apologists fail to explain how the Holy Spirit could guide the authors of Scripture but not the Magisterium of the Church. They fail to explain how God is capable of turning water into wine in 30 A.D., but just couldn’t have appeared before a poor Polish nun in the 1930s to tell her about His great mercy. They fail to explain how the one is the action of God, but the other little better than ignorant superstition.

Protestant apologists want to confine the miracles of God to the pages of a book, because in their hands the pages of a book are safe and unthreatening. A book can be contained; it can be submitted to exegesis, to cool reason, to the canons of academic theology. Thus they cannot fathom the fullness of the unbindable glory of God; and that is, in fact, to be atheistic—in both ecclesiology and the religious imagination. An image of Mary on a 16th-century tilma is as superstitious for a Protestant apologist to believe in, as the Resurrection itself is superstitious for an atheist to believe in.

It was G.K. Chesterton who helped reveal this truth to Mr. Stellman because of his insistence that Christians “recover that sense of childlike wonder which humility tends to foster. … [R]ed dragons are needed to amaze us because red apples no longer do.” That is correct, and I would add another Chestertonian observation to the mix. In his great book Orthodoxy, Chesterton (who hated Calvinism, which is why I love Chesterton) talks about what it means to be mad. He says that the error in the way we think about madness is to attribute it to the loss of reason. The truth is, rather, the opposite. “Poets do not go mad,” he says, “but chess players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. … The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason” (10-11, 13).

But therein is the Protestant paradigm: Protestants are very good at scriptural exegesis (albeit within their own heretical framework), and they are very good at analytical homiletics. But they have little sense, in their theological orientation, of wonder or miracle or the supernatural. To the supernatural, such as they accept it, they bring mere cold reason and empty white rooms. They do not know what Gerard Manley Hopkins meant when he wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And that is why they—and especially the Calvinists in their midst—are mad.

All this is what Mr. Stellman has come to understand over the past years; and that is why his witness and testimony are of such great value to the Church—to those who are in it, and those who will be brought to it because of what he has written.

Kudos, and a belated “Welcome home,” to Jason Stellman.

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