[Also on Substack]
Rod Dreher’s gratuitous dig at the formal principle of the Reformation made for a handy foil for a response. The dig could have come from any Catholic; I’m sorry it came from him.
I’ve enjoyed Rod’s writing, including his latest essay,[1] and am glad to get my fill of it on his Substack “Diary.” But I cannot respond, as I feel I must, to that portion of his essay (a tissue of emotive non sequiturs) without coming across as gracelessly unecumenical.
Let the chips fall where they may.
I won’t disturb the peace of Rod’s combox with my biblicist (i.e., Sola Scriptura-based) protest, which he must find intolerably tone deaf. I welcome such disturbance here if anyone thinks fomenting it is worth the bother.
First, we have the irenic autobiographical set-up:
Though I would learn in time that I was wrong to judge all of Protestantism by my own experiences, and by megachurchery — there really is intellectual depth there, is what I’m saying, and besides, you cannot deny many good fruits in the lives of individual Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ . . .
Well, thank you very much!
. . . — there is zero chance that I would become Protestant.
Why? Here comes a dash of what I must call Newmanesque snobbery.
I agree, with [19th-century Roman Catholic convert and “canonized saint” John Henry Cardinal] Newman, that to go deep into history is to cease to be Protestant.
Its sheer assertion prompts my invocation of infidel Christopher Hitchens’s apt “razor”: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.