There is a post on the Ignatius Press Blog this morning that I found confusing. Essentially they were discussing what to call protestants. The consensus seemed to be that it was appropriate to call them "fellow believers."
I converted from atheism and nihilism, and my conversion was very philosophical. I became convinced that either the divine Logos, the very principle of truth, existed and had descended and become one of us, and that this communication of the divine reason continued unabated, or we had no way to get out of our own heads.
My thinking went something like this: All the universe is a thought. Either our own, as the post-modernists would have it, or God's. If it's our own than there is no truth, there is no way out of the thought. If it is God's there is still no way to know what is true and what isn't unless God's thought and the world we perceive are one and the same. But we have no way of knowing this unless God affirms it. This happened in Christ. But if it was a one-time event, if the divine Logos descended and then re-ascended, we are again left in the same predicament: how can we know who Christ was, how can we know what parts of the universe as we perceive it are affirmed and what parts denied? If the incarnation was the whole story, are not we in the same epistemological fog as the generations before the incarnation?
My conclusion was that either the thought of God continued to directly affirm the existence of the world and of us as individuals in it or we could know nothing. But how could the affirmation of God touching the world be communicated to us without the problem of our own minds popping up again. How could the truth be communicated to us in a way that it defeated the sceptical argument? My answer was that the communication could not be verbal or symbolic or in anyway limited; it had to be total and to the entire person, it had to transcend the labels and categories of language and thought: in short there had to be a soul and grace that touched it, but this grace had to be communicated to us in a manner that reaffirmed the existence of the universe and our existence as distinct persons in it. I became convinced that the incarnation of the Divine Logos either bestows grace on us perpetually through the sacraments of the Catholic Church or the only philosophically consistent option was nihilism. I realize this may sound convoluted and unconvincing, and actually as I reconsider it I find much less necessary than I once had, and I have since learned to love and to pray and have developed a faith that views my previous ideas as somewhat adolescent. But nevertheless, to me Christianity continues to be, in its essence, a sacrament.
And so the assertion that protestants are fellow believers in confusing to me. It seems to me that protestantism most certainly denies “central mysteries” of the faith, namely the sacraments. The denial that the incarnational mission of Christ continues directly through the sacraments is no small departure or fine theological point. In his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, St. Thomas went so far as to assert that the establishment of the Eucharist and the priesthood that confects it was the reason for Christ's incarnation. To deny that God continues to touch man directly and materially and in a manner no way diminished from when he actually walked and died among us, in favor of a religion that understands man's relationship with God as being purely spiritual is, it seems to me, to revert to Judaism. The sacraments are not Catholic “bonuses” that are tacked on to the essentials of Christian faith and “separated” believers are rightly considered protestant to the extent that they deny the essential, sacramental nature of Christianity. This would suggest that the more protestant one is, the less Christian. But I’m no theologian; maybe I’m wrong. If so, could someone please explain to me my error.