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Protestants, many of us Catholic apologists argue, effectively act as their own popes. The reason why, we allege, is that every Protestant is ultimately accountable to his personal interpretation of divine revelation, which for Protestants is solely the sixty-six-book Protestant Bible. Every Protestant, we posit, acts as his own magisterial authority, both in interpreting the Bible and even in deciding what constitutes the Bible, given their rejection of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-defend-the-deuterocanonicals">deuterocanon</a>.
But not so, declare our Protestant counterparts! They, like us Catholics, have confessions and creeds to which they submit. Carl R. Trueman, one of the most brilliant and interesting intellects in modern Protestantism, last year <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/11/protestants-need-to-go-back-to-basics">urged</a> his fellow Protestants to return to “orthodox Christian doctrines as set forth by the creeds, the Great Tradition of theology exemplified by the ancient ecumenical councils, and traditional Protestant confessions such as the Westminster Confession.” Kim Riddlebarger, a co-host of the popular White Horse Inn podcast, <a href="https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/about-the-author">declares</a>, “If you were to ask, ‘what is it that defines Christianity?’, my answer now would be ‘the definition of Christianity is given us in the Creed.’”
Recently, a friend sent me a video of Methodist lay apologist Joshua Pearsall, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjbNPvzH8QI&amp;t=105s">makes a similar argument</a> in reference to my book, <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-obscurity-in-scripture-disputing-sola-scriptura-and-the-protestant-notion-of-biblical-perspicuity/?srsltid=AfmBOor7SNuNT5o002l6Y6MiuN14F4UagxCOJWCBmGhv1rN3cnnkD79G">The Obscurity of Scripture</a>. Citing confessional standards of such denominations as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and his own Methodist tradition, Pearsall asserts, “You literally can’t be your own pope. You are accountable to the standards of your tradition and of course the Scriptures on top of that.” Others, such as <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/10/01/the-reformation-as-renewal-is-an-exemplar-of-special-pleading/">Reformed scholar Matthew Barrett</a> in his recent work The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, claims much the same.
I can appreciate the thinking behind this Protestant line of argumentation. Indeed, I would have mouthed similar things fifteen years ago when I was a Presbyterian seminary student. Of course I wasn’t like those ignorant, low-church evangelicals with no knowledge of church history, no knowledge of Nicaea or Chalcedon, no knowledge even of their own Protestant theological ancestry. I eagerly submitted to the Westminster Standards, believing them to be an accurate interpretation of biblical truth.
But that, I eventually realized, was exactly the problem. I adhered to Reformed confessional documents based on their conformity to Holy Scripture—but whose interpretation of it? My own, ultimately. Nor was this my own novel understanding of how things are supposed to work within the Protestant paradigm. This is precisely the way they are supposed to work.
Why, for example, was I a Presbyterian rather than an Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist? Why was I submitting to the Westminster Confession of Faith rather than the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg Confession, or the Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith? Because I, as a conscientious, “Bible-believing” Christian, had determined that the particular confessional documents of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) were sufficiently biblical to merit my allegiance. My own pastors and professors told me that if I believed another Protestant denomination was more biblically faithful, I should follow my conscience and go there instead.
Who is in the interpretative drivers’ seat in such a scenario? The individual Christian, naturally. If Carl Trueman, Kim Riddlebarger, Matthew Barrett, or any other Protestant Christian read his Bible and came to believe that his particular Protestant tradition and its confessional documents are erroneous, it would be his prerogative to either protest those errors within his own denomination or, if he viewed them as sufficiently egregious, to join a different ecclesial community. He might even feel compelled to establish his own.
And that explains not only five hundred years of fissiparous Protestant history, but the remarkable explosion of non-denominational, Bible-based, evangelical churches in the last few generations. All of them purport to be simply returning to the fundamentals of Scripture, and all of them cannot help but offer their own bespoke takes on Christian doctrine and praxis.
Granted, I presume that many if not most Protestants do not intend this. They do not want to be postmodern individualists determining reality for themselves. They want to be embedded in the history and traditions of Christianity. That’s why they constantly cite not only Reformers such as Luther, Calvin, Turretin, Cranmer, and Owen, but also Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Jerome, and Augustine. What Catholics and traditionally minded Protestants share is a desire to be united to something greater than themselves, a proclivity for the ancient and venerable. We all want to believe that our faith was not born yesterday, but descends from the apostles.
The question is whether the Protestant paradigm, in any of its manifold manifestations, is actually capable of coherently doing so. What I came to realize almost fifteen years ago is no, it cannot. Even Pearsall in his YouTube videos attempting to refute my book cannot help but undermine his position, acknowledging that many Protestants are failing to honor their own confessional standards . . . and then immediately admitting that confessional standards are not infallible and “can be corrected down the line if they need to be.” Corrected according to what standard? The standard of the individual’s interpretation of Scripture.
In other words, Protestant creeds and confessional standards have only as much authority as Protestants are willing to grant them. If a Protestant comes to assess them as inadequate, on whatever grounds related to his conscience, he may edit or even dispense with them. And this applies not only to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant creeds, but the ecumenical councils of the ancient Church. This is why Protestants <a href="https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/ask-ligonier/what-does-it-mean-that-the-first-seven-church-councils-were-ecumenical">pick and choose which ecumenical councils they accept</a>. Indeed, many Protestants even argue that <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/confess-jesus-descended-into-hell/">parts of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed</a> are unbiblical and need not be accepted. And why not?
Catholics do not inhabit the same paradigmatic position. We do not pick and choose which councils or creeds to which we submit. We accept the authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church en totale, because we recognize that it has been granted that authority by Christ himself, preserved by the Holy Spirit. Such a recognition requires an act of faith, but it is based on evidence and reason, pre-eminently the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/my-church-is-more-credible-than-yours">motives of credibility</a>. And, unlike Protestants, whose interpretive authority of divine revelation rests in the conscience of each individual Christian, Catholics acknowledge a living Magisterium, whose voice is manifested not only through ecumenical councils, but, in certain narrow circumstances, through the living pope.
Creeds can’t save Protestantism from its inevitable descent into an individualism that equates to every individual Christian acting as his own pope. Only the Catholic Church with its internally coherent and historically verifiable magisterial authority can resolve the Protestant’s dilemma and give him the certitude that he is indeed following Christ and the fullness of his teaching, rather than the (often well-meaning) whims of his own conscience.

Creeds Can’t Save Protestantism

The Romans, as any first-year Latin student can tell you, were in the practice of ending their sentences with verbs. Regina agricolam amat, for example—literally, “The queen the farmer loves.” Unless you are Yoda, however, you would speak this sentence in English this way: “The queen loves the farmer.” (Something tells me this relationship is not going to work out.)
In any case, Latin word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, object, verb. In English, word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, verb, object. Because Latin nouns are declined—that is, they are assigned distinct endings for how they function in a sentence—it is easy to identify the subject and the object.
The Church preserves the practice of ending sentences and clauses with the predicate. Indeed, here is a sentence from Benedict XVI&#8217;s renunciation of the Petrine Office.
<blockquote>
Nunc autem Sanctam Dei Ecclesiam curae Summi eius Pastoris, Domini nostri Iesu Christi confidimus sanctamque eius Matrem Mariam imploramus, ut patribus Cardinalibus in eligendo novo Summo Pontifice materna sua bonitate assistat.
</blockquote>
 And here it is in English:
<blockquote>
And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff.
</blockquote>
I’ve put the verbs in italics so that you can see where they fall in their respective clauses.
What’s the point of this little exposition on Latin syntax? Well, sometimes a translator can alter the quality of a sentence, even unintentionally, by failing to appreciate how a verb at the end of sentence delivers a certain emphasis. Here is an example that you will know. It is the second sentence of Pope Leo XIII’s exorcism prayer that we know as the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel.
First the Latin (with diacritics from the 1962 Roman Missal):
<blockquote>
Ímperet ílli Déus, súpplices deprecámur: tuque, prínceps milítiæ cæléstis, Sátanam aliósque spíritus malígnos, qui ad perditiónem animárum pervagántur in múndo, divína virtúte, in inférnum detrúde. Amen.
</blockquote>
And here is the English:
<blockquote>
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
</blockquote>
Now, before I make my point about verbs, there are a few things about the English translation that are of interest:
<ul>
<li class="p1">“Rebuke” is not a strict translation of imperet, which really means &#8220;rule&#8221; or &#8220;command.&#8221; But &#8220;rebuke&#8221; gives a more militant emphasis to the prayer, so a gold star to the translator for that one.</li>
<li class="p1">“Wander . . . through” is a faithful translation of pervagantur (we find the same root in “vagabond” and “vague”), but I prefer “prowl” because it has an emphasis of menace.</li>
<li class="p1">“Divine power” would be a more faithful translation of divina virtute than “power of God” (and you hear some people say that), but even &#8220;power&#8221; does not give the Latin sense of virtu, which really means something closer to “manly strength” and even “courage under fire” or “courage in adversity.” (For an extensive consideration of this concept of virtu and what it meant to the Romans, see Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.) The fact is, however, that we really don’t have an English word for this concept, so “power” is about as close as we can come without ham-handing the translation.</li>
</ul>
But here is the main problem with the English. The ending of the prayer, we have to admit, is a bit of a downer. This prayer is a vigorous battle cry, and the English translation ends with an image of defeat—that is, “the ruin of souls.” Not inspiring, I’m afraid, and certainly not what Leo intended.
The Latin, however, ends with the action verb detrude, from detrudere, which means “to thrust away.” In fact, I prefer “thrust into hell” to “cast into hell,” and detrude in English is a transitive verb that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “to thrust or force down.” Whether you like “thrust” or “cast,” the sense at the end of the prayer when it is said in Latin is one of victory, not of defeat. We have an image of the vigorous warrior-angel casting Satan and his demons into hell. In English, we are left with an image of souls falling into perdition.
There is a canard about translations: they can be faithful or beautiful. Alas, here the translator has been as faithful as he can be while still hewing to the practices of English word order. If he wanted to preserve the sense of vigorous victory, however, he would have to get a little creative and add another verb—in this case, “bind.” Sure, he would have to take some liberty with the original Latin, but in so doing, I think he would better preserve the martial quality of the prayer. How about this?
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray . . . and do thou, o Prince of the heavenly host, by the divine power, bind Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls, and thrust them into hell!
Feel the difference? I think Leo would approve.

St. Michael Prayer: A Better Translation?

Cy Kellett talks about beauty and the revitalization of culture with Bernardo Aparicio Garcia, founder and publisher of Dappled Things, a literary magazine dedicated to providing a space for emerging writers to engage the literary world from a Catholic perspective. Why does the literary world need the Catholic perspective? Bernardo gets into that and more in this wide-ranging interview.