What is the Gospel?
Faith in Jesus' words
Protestants, particularly Baptists and conservative Evangelicals, do get the Gospel correct when they say, concisely, that it is placing one’s faith in Jesus Christ. However, they have a misunderstanding as to what it means to have faith in Christ. Their definition typically amounts to “mental ascent.” Even if they do agree faith must be accompanied by works, they misunderstand works as well.
To have faith in Jesus means that you heard His claims and believe them. This includes both His claims about Himself, and His requirements. Jesus said that we must be baptized (John 3:5), we must literally eat His body and drink His blood (John 6:47-66), and that we must pick up our crosses and follow Him (Matthew 16:24-25). He said that we must leave any sinful ways of living (Luke 13:1-5). At the Ascension, Jesus didn’t leave as Bible for us, He left a Church for us (Luke 24:45-49). We are ordered to be part of that Church, and it is not only a spiritual group but a physical group, exactly as it was during and proceeding the New Testament.
Jesus gave us Apostles to follow, and never said there would come a time where we no longer had any to lead and guide us. They will always be our literal, physical leaders. The Church requires Apostles, and they are today the Catholic Bishops and Pope. The Apostles were not perfect men like Jesus was, but they were selected by God (including Judas, who served as a lesson that even some Church leaders would commit sin or betrayal). The Catholic Priesthood is not perfect just like the original 12 Disciples were not perfect. But like the 12, they were selected by God.
As the Apostles could not officially teach any major errors on matters of faith and morals, neither can the Pope or Bishops. Satan himself works hard to deceive people into thinking the Pope and Bishops are or were in error, but every accusation over the past 2000+ years is easily refuted. This includes the false claims about the great Pope Francis prevalent today.
From the Church we receive baptism, Holy Communion, and supernatural graces to help us carry our crosses. These graces include saintly intercession, to the quickening effect of confession and penance. If you have faith in Jesus, you do not simply place your trust in Him to save you from hell. You believe Jesus’ words and follow them. Jesus said, “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The devil works hard to deceive millions that the yoke of Christ is heavy, and requires one to become some kind of modern Pharisee or an ascetic of some sort to enter heaven. But Christ’s yoke is easy.
Things are required of you, such as Mass attendance every week, baptism, and more, but none of these requirements are serious burdens or at all unreasonable. They all lead to blessings, so even the works Christ requires have huge benefits. They were made to bless us. Any inconvenience is outweighed a thousand-fold by their blessings.
Because Protestants mis-define what it means to have faith in Jesus, their souls are in peril because they lack the graces of Christ that are only found in His Church. Even though many can get to heaven, they do so in spite of Protestant beliefs, not because of them. If they make it to heaven, they make it as a Catholic in the sense that God granted them membership in the Catholic Church, not holding their ignorance against them.
I believe personally that many Protestants do indeed go to heaven, however, many are also needlessly damned because they slid into mortal sin that they otherwise would have more easily avoided or repented of had they had Christ’s blessings in the Church. To be outside of the Church is a precarious position, because you lack the full arsenal of the faith.
Protestant theology is often harsh and brutal. You can make it gentle by mixing theologies, but that always leads to major gaps in logic, and smarter people will not be able to ignore these glaring issues. For example, Calvinist theology teaches that one can never lose their salvation. “Once saved, always saved.” The doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints. But this belief only makes sense when combined with the entirety of Calvinism, including harsh and repugnant ideas such as God predestining most humans to hell. Calvinists believe God only predestined some people to heaven. and most of humanity is damned because they did not accept a free gift they had no capacity to ever accept. It makes God out to be a villain. Perseverance of the Saints is reliant on other doctrines, such as Predestination, to make Perseverance theologically and logically possible in accordance with even the edited Protestant Bible.
Many modern Protestants will often take an Arminian theological stance on the topic of predestination, saying, as Jacobus Arminius did, that every human has a chance at salvation and to the degree that anyone is predestined it’s because God knew they would choose voluntarily choose Him. But then they cannot claim Perseverance of the Saints is true without introducing a myriad of contradictions and problems. However, many American Protestants do anyway, especially Baptists and Evangelicals.
You cannot mix Calvinism and Arminianism without creating extreme gaps in logic and significant contradictions that destroy the entire Christian faith. You are almost definitely not smarter than John Calvin or Arminus. The patchwork theology some Protestants create is senseless and even easily refuted by non-Christians. They want to have only good things and so they adopt a conflicting theology that can’t possibly be true. Or they wholesale adopt a brutal theology that is a far greater burden than anything Christ or the Catholic Church would place on them.
Protestants revere Martin Luther, but Luther would not likely consider the vast majority of professing Protestants to even be Christian. This includes probably most Lutherans in 2024, as the denomination has suffered hundreds of divisions and is now in large part a collection of liberal extremists. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and other Protestant revolutionaries vehemently condemned one another, and when they didn’t condemn one another personally, they heavily condemned certain aspects of other Protestant theologies. Many modern Protestants would burned at the stake by both Calvin and Luther for their beliefs. And if you don’t believe me, Calvin killed children thanks to his self-interpretation of Scripture, in addition to condemning many others to brutal deaths. Calvin was divorced of the reason and restraint of the Catholic Church, and eventually his followers had to overrule his extremism and bloodlust. To this day, Reformed theologians seek to explain away or minimize the documented atrocities of the Genevan Tyrant, because they want to keep his Institutes of the Christian Religion.
The Gospel is that we are all sinners, and Christ died for us, and if we place our faith in Him, we will have everlasting life and avoid damnation. But placing our faith in Him means we believe what He said, just like if we place our faith in the leadership of a sports coach we believe in and carry out what he or she says to do. And what Jesus said to do is perfectly clear, there is no Bible verse that requires self-interpretation (2nd Peter 1:20).
God would be immensely cruel if He gave us a Perfect Book without a Perfect Interpretation to accompany it. Frankly, the Bible is useless or even dangerous without a perfect interpreter. And the early Protestant leaders agreed with this, they just all thought they were the perfect interpreters (Martin Luther went so far as to delete 25 books of the Bible, including 3 Gospels, Esther, Revelation and James - not only the “Deuterocanon”). Nowadays Protestants generally believe that the Holy Spirit guides them to the perfect interpretation, at least on all the important subjects, even though Protestants wildly disagree on every important subject. This is now often true within the same denomination and Protestant church building.
You can find in many Protestant groups total disagreements on what Baptism does, the need for repentance, and the ability to lose one’s salvation, among other things. And they will often shrug them off and claim somehow that these are not important doctrines that should jeopardize unity. However, it is difficult to find anything except very vague statements about loving God or having faith in Jesus that they all agree on, and they would define what loving God and having faith means differently to some degree. Most of the time when I read a Protestant church’s faith statement it’s the same extremely high level stuff that makes little to no specific claims and says nothing about the many important topics such as infant baptism, or even baptism in the first place. They have to minimize taking stances on most important subjects to minimize how many people they will turn off as churchgoers and donors.
God is not cruel. He gave us the perfect interpretation of His perfect book through the Catholic Church, which has perfectly interpreted it without change or error since it canonized the Bible in the 300’s. Jesus did not give us a Bible, he gave us a Church that gave us the Bible over 300 years after He was crucified, which is interestingly decades after the construction of the Hagia Sophia started. The same Church that canonized the Bible also perfectly interprets it. A Catholic does not need to debate the meaning of any part of Scripture, they only need to learn its meaning. This is what Christ intended.
Yes, the Church has problems. It has human beings, so it will always have problems. But it is infallible on all dogma. We can have total trust in the Pope on all matters of faith and morals, as God provides special guidance to him, just as God personally revealed to St. Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. It was a conclusion that required divine revelation (Matthew 16:13-19). The Pope has a special charism as the inheritor of the Seat of Peter, the leader of the Church after Christ ascended. If you are angry that the Pope did something you do not agree with, like ban the death penalty, you are obligated to obey him regardless, and you should seek to understand why you are wrong. Do not be like the Judaizers who condemned the Apostles thinking themselves to be Christian while they rejected all of Christ’s chosen leaders (Galatians 2).
The solution is to follow Jesus and to join His Catholic Church. Not Pastor Jim’s Bible church, the Southern Baptists who now refuse to profess the Nicene Creed as they continue to devolve like all Protestant denominations do, the Lutheran Missouri Synod, or “Lifehouse Christian Community.” The idea that any one of these recent inventions is the true Church founded by Christ is sheer lunacy, in my opinion. These are just groups run by self-proclaimed leaders who have no actual authority from the actual Church. They did not receive any Apostolic inheritance like Mathias did in the Book of Acts (Acts 1:12-26). They were just hired or self-declared themselves to be pastors. They might indeed help save many souls despite their ignorance, but that’s because God loves humanity and is generous. But anyone who joins them is at a severe disadvantage to the Catholic believer who has the fullness of the faith - the full version of Christianity.