A review of Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic by Jerry Walls
Ernest Hemingway’s first commercial success, “The Sun Also Rises”, was built around the metaphor of an emasculated war hero, Jake Barnes, who had been wounded in World War I and lost the functionality (or more) of his genitals.
“Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed. … Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny. … My head started to work. The old grievance. Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded.… I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brett [with whom he had fallen in love] when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it” (emphasis added).
Hemingway was raised Protestant but converted to Catholicism as a young man after being severely wounded in World War I, where he was baptized on the battlefield by an Italian priest. He later reaffirmed his conversion in 1927 ahead of his marriage to his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic woman. Hemingway identified strongly with Catholicism at times, stating in a couple of personal letters that year, “If I am anything I am a Catholic… I cannot imagine taking any other religion seriously.”
As it turned out, he couldn’t take his Roman Catholicism seriously either. Hemingway’s own complicated relationship with Catholicism, which he initially embraced and eventually neglected, mirrors the broader instability of many modern conversion stories.
He eventually divorced Pauline, and he was married two other times. He lived the life of an explorer, and he made his reputation writing about adventures in Europe and Africa and the Caribbean, before ending his own life in 1962.
There are seemingly a lot of conversions to Catholicism these days, especially among “intellectuals”, and Roman Catholic writers like to publicize these stories. Less publicized are the “de-conversion” stories.
On the flip side of that coin, there are the people who are pressured to convert to Roman Catholicism, who nevertheless have the ability to think through the important issues and who decide not to convert.
Jerry Walls is one of these individuals, who faced a great deal of pressure to convert, but did not convert.
His work, “Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic”, published earlier this year, tells of that story and his thought process. A long-time professor of philosophy at Houston Baptist University (later Houston Christian University), Walls studied at, and has degrees from, among other places, Princeton Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Notre Dame.
“My first serious engagement with Roman Catholicism that I can recall came when I enrolled as a graduate student in the philosophy department at Notre Dame in the fall of 1984,” where, he said, “Notre Dame was in the process of building a great Christian philosophy department” (from the Introduction, pp. xi–xii).
He wrote a dissertation on “damnation”, which he later published as a work on Hell. Following up, he also wrote works on Heaven and Purgatory, and through that pathway, he came into the orbit of the journal First Things, its editor Father Richard John Neuhaus.
“Shortly thereafter [Neuhaus] invited me to join the Dulles Colloquium, an ecumenical theology discussion group hosted by him and [Cardinal] Avery Dulles, after whom it was named…. I regularly defended the Protestant view in these discussions with Neuhaus and other members of the group.
“In retrospect, I suspect that an unofficial agenda of the Dulles Colloquium—and I say this with all due affection—was to be a Catholic Conversion Club, particularly with the aim of converting Protestant intellectuals to Rome” (from the Introduction, pp. xii–xiii).
In 2017, he and the former Roman Catholic Kenneth Collins (now a professor of Church History at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky) published “Roman but Not Catholic”, an academic work that was intended to be used as a seminary text on the topic.
In this new work, Walls describes his current thinking on the topic in a way that he describes as “a friendly, ecumenical explanation”.
The tone may be friendly, but in the course of the argument, Walls takes on some serious issues. His first target is “the papacy”, the contradictions of which he explores in depth in the first three chapters.
In Chapter One, “If Christ Be Not Raised” Walls explores the parallels between the fact that “the papacy” is a “dogmatic fact”, insofar as “the Petrine succession is at the heart and soul of Roman Catholic ecclesiology. The argument: Paul can state with clarity, “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, and your faith also is vain”.
And yet, given that historically, the Roman church has taught, most forcefully at Vatican I, that “No one can be in doubt, indeed it was known in every age that the most holy and most blessed Peter, prince and head of the apostles,… to this day and forever he lives and presides and exercises judgment in his successors the bishops of the Holy Roman See, which he founded and consecrated with his blood…” (cited on p. 6).
I have quoted [Vatican I] at length here to show the substance of the classic Roman Catholic claims about the papacy and, moreover, how strong these claims are (p. 7).
If these papal claims are not true, [in the same way that “if Christ has not been raised … then your faith is in vain], then Rome’s distinctive claims founder and fail” (p. 8).
In the next couple of sections, he draws very serious parallels between the role of the resurrection-to-Christianity and the role of Peter-to-the-papacy. “In both cases, very strong claims are made about the vital importance of accepting the truth of what is proclaimed and the clear implications that follow.
The bulk of this chapter contains outlines for both the “impressive historical evidence for the resurrection”, in contrast to the fact that “there is not such evidence for Roman Catholic papal claims” (p. 9).
In Chapter Two, he explores the Roman Catholic fallback position, that “the papacy needed time to develop”. He takes on this task from multiple perspectives
“What is at stake here are purported factual claims about history which underwrite the distinctive Roman papal and ecclesial claims, namely that Peter was ‘immediately and directly’ given universal jurisdiction over the church by promise from Christ and that his successors also had this role’” (p. 20).
In fact, recent “ecumenical” dialogues with the Eastern Orthodox (such as the 2016 “Chieti” document) clearly reject this notion:
“The primacy of the bishop of Rome among the bishops was gradually interpreted as a prerogative that was his because he was successor of Peter, the first of the apostles. This understanding was not adopted in the East, which had a different interpretation of the Scriptures and the Fathers on this point.”
The factual basis for this statement has been acknowledged by both sides of the Ecumenical discussion.
In Chapter Three, Walls takes on what he calls “The Problem of Bad Popes”. “If Peter was indeed given authority over the whole church; if his successors, the bishops of Rome, have the same authority; if God has providentially preserved an unbroken succession … then it is reasonable to expect that all popes would meet the basic New Testament standard for bishops, or at the very least be persons of sincere faith in Christ” (p. 39).
Of course, the lineage of the papacy meets none of those basic qualifications, and in that case, “Roman Catholics often retreat to making very modest claims about the papacy” (p.49).
This threefold critique should discourage any serious belief in the legitimacy of the papacy. The remainder of the book presses further to address common assertions that are made by contemporary Roman Catholic apologists.
- Chapter Four, “Cardinal Confusions”, discusses the Roman Catholic doctrine of “Development”.
- “Revelation, Canon, and Creed” (Chapter Five);
- “It All Depends on Mary” (Chapter Six);
- “Catholic Conversion and Coercion” (dealing with the “Magisterial” prestidigitation on “No Salvation Outside the Church, Chapter Seven);
- “You Are Your Own Pope” (a critique of Protestantism, Chapter Eight),
- “Protestants In the Crosshairs (a critique of popular Roman Catholic apologetics, Chapter Nine);
- “The World’s Largest Pluralist Christian Denomination?” (asking that, given some of the broad doctrinal disagreements WITHIN Roman Catholicism, it is really an illusion that there is ”unity” within Roman Catholicism).
In his conclusion, he discusses the word “Catholic” as “universal”, and how many Protestants are “Free to Be More Catholic than Roman Catholics”.
“My quarrel is not with what is truly catholic, in the sense of what is universal, but with the distinctive and exclusive claims of the Church of Rome, It is precisely there, ironically, that the Church of Rome is not truly catholic. C.S. Lewis put the matter rather pointedly: ‘In a word, the whole set-up of modern Romanism seems to me to be as much a provincial or local variation from the central, ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is’” (p. 177, citing a letter from Hooper, “Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis”).
As an added bonus, a brief Appendix challenges “Matthew 16 and the Papacy”. Walls’s brief appendix on Matthew 16, which is the foundational proof text for papal claims, adds value by addressing recent confusions over that critical passage. And while the Appendix in no way provides a comprehensive treatment of that controversial chapter, it outlines some of the popular confusions that have been brought to the forefront in recent years.
While “Rome’s Strategic Play for Protestant Elites” has been seen to be a problem in our day, I think that Walls’s firm but kind treatment of these issues should be presented to anyone who is being pressed by contemporary Roman apologists.
Image Credit: Unsplash
