A counterblast to Dr.* James White and his blithe denial of 48,509 Protestant sects.

nce upon a Tues­day night in May—’twas in the hal­cy­on days when there were yet no more than a mere 48,503 Protes­tant sects—Dr.* James Robert White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.), of Alpha & Omega Sophistries (he calls it “Min­istries”; it’s a crotch­et of his), ensconced in the red and scarred Phoenix desert of mir­rors crack­’d from side to side and shorn in scores, was soon to have his blithe and self-illu­sions dis­rupt­ed by the fol­low­ing mis­sive from myself, alert­ing him to the exis­tence of this blog post:

https://twitter.com/ScottEricAlt/statuses/334469914649845761

To which mis­sive, via vir­tu­al camel car­ri­er, and nomad in tow, and a dust of sand, the good Reformed Bap­tist elder, apol­o­gist, and doc­tor­al recip­i­ent (as he saith) replied, thus:

@scottericalt Your num­ber is so absurd it destroys any cred­i­bil­i­ty on your part. Stop pro­mot­ing such silli­ness.

— 𝔚𝔥𝔦𝔱𝔢𝔅𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔡 (@HwsEleutheroi) May 15, 2013

Hor­rors.  I rend my robes to think of it.  The last thing I would want is for a Catholic apol­o­gist to lose his cred­i­bil­i­ty in the esti­ma­tion of a Reformed apol­o­gist (espe­cial­ly one as stud­ied, and trav­eled, and bur­nished and pol­ished and glossed with cre­den­tials, as the good Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.). That nev­er hap­pens. I would be the first in the long his­to­ry of the Church.

Not sat­is­fied with tweet­ing such dire warn­ings to “stop!” how­ev­er, the afore­said good Reformed Bap­tist elder, apol­o­gist, and doc­tor­al recip­i­ent (as he saith) con­tin­ued, thus:

@scot­ter­i­calt aomin.org/aoblog/index.p… Ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed. I await your response.

— James White (@DrOakley1689) May 15, 2013

Well, since you asked, Dr.* White. I would be glad to help you sort through your doc­u­men­ta­tion issues.  This is as free a ser­vice as you shall come by from here to eter­ni­ty, from camel to West­ern Union to cyber­mis­sive.

The Deceitful Ways of Mr. Ray

The blog arti­cle to which, in kind­ly help­ful­ness, the good Reformed Bap­tist elder, apol­o­gist, and doc­tor­al recip­i­ent (as he saith), pin­na­cle of cred­i­bil­i­ty and non-silli­ness, man of let­ters, mar­vel of light and rea­son, etc., etc., direct­ed me, was one with which I am, of course, famil­iar.  To spare the read­er the pain and tedi­um of read­ing it (and the pain is dia­bol­ic, that let me tell you), I will reveal that said blog arti­cle is devot­ed to expos­ing the “temerity”—yea, the down­right mendacity!—of Steve Ray in pro­mot­ing the fig­ure of 33,000 sects.  (Which fig­ure Mr. Ray obtained from the 2001 World Chris­t­ian Ency­clo­pe­dia, a known pro­mot­er of fab­ri­ca­tions, lies, pre­var­i­ca­tions, false­hoods, Caner­isms, etc., etc.)

Accord­ing to Dr.* White, how­ev­er, that ency­clo­pe­dic fig­ure has “no mean­ing to any seri­ous-mind­ed indi­vid­ual.” (Dr.* White being, as it were by self-pro­mo­tion, the blo­gos­phere’s arbiter of seri­ous-mind­ed­ness. Twit­ter’s too. Dr.* White has cor­nered the mar­ket for seri­ous­ness in the New Media.)  Mr. Ray is “will­ing to throw his integri­ty under the bus,” saith Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.), who attrib­ut­es such a shock­ing lev­el of deceit to “the way of the Catholic Con­vert.” Mr. Ray is more than mere man, you see; he is an arche­type of moral dis­re­pair exist­ing in the anti-Catholic imag­i­na­tion.

Thus is it any won­der that, when I would posit 48,500 as the cred­i­ble prod­uct and sum of twelve years of sec­tar­i­an increase, Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.) would pro­claim me “absurd” and lack­ing in the seri­ous­ness that he him­self is well known for?  Heav­ens, first Dr.* White com­pares me to Jason Stell­man, and now to Steve Ray! And here I am, who have been blog­ging for less than half a year. If I keep going at this same dan­ger­ous and fol­ly-rid­den rate, soon I’ll be on a par with the wicked­ness of Mr. Sta­ples, Fr. Stravin­skis, Mr. Sun­ge­nis, dare I even hope Mr. Keat­ing or Dr. Cross or Dr. Hahn?

But let me sat­is­fy Dr.* White’s seri­ous-mind­ed curios­i­ty about the nature of my response (which he appears to “await”).  Let us at the out­set peer into the heart of the good Reformed Bap­tist elder, apol­o­gist, and doc­tor­al recip­i­en­t’s cri­tique of the temer­ar­i­ous Steve Ray. Saith Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min, etc., etc.): “This source [i.e., the World Chris­t­ian Ency­clo­pe­dia] lists 8,973 ‘[sects] under ‘Protes­tant.’ ”

[Note the scare quotes to imply def­i­n­i­tion­al doubt about sect and Protes­tant.  This is what is known as poi­son­ing the well.]

So what does [Steve Ray] do when he has all along been clam­ing the 33,000 num­ber rep­re­sents Protes­tants derived from the Ref­or­ma­tion due to sola scrip­tura?  What does he do? [Your guess is as good as mine, dear read­er, why Dr.* White, in eager, breath­less fash­ion, asks that ques­tion twice.] Well, he takes the Protes­tant cat­e­go­ry, lumps the “Inde­pen­dents” in as “Protes­tants” (includ­ing Mor­mons, Jeho­vah’s Wit­ness­es, Gnos­tics, Bogomils, and even Swe­den­bor­gian­ists!), then, so des­per­ate is the man, he then [Then he then?] grabs such groups as “Arab radio/TV net­work” (19 [sects] worth!) and “Japan­ese One­ness Pen­te­costal” (14 [sects] worth) to help pad his num­bers!

You can almost hear the vic­to­ri­ous Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.) cry, with vin­di­ca­tion and mirth and con­fet­ti, See! Why, look you now! there aren’t 33,000 Protes­tant sects—nowhere close. Accord­ing to Mr. Ray’s very source, there are only just less than 9000. Protes­tantism is as good as gold. It does­n’t have a sect prob­lem at all.  Not at all, no sir!  Mr. Ray does not want you to think about that one! Ha-ha!

As many times as Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min, etc., etc.) has addressed the sub­ject of how many Protes­tant sects there are, this is the heart of his mat­ter:  The World Chris­t­ian Ency­clo­pe­dia does not say 33,000. That fig­ure can only be derived by search­ing about, in duplic­i­tous and des­per­ate fash­ion (like the evil Mr. Ray did), for addi­tion­al num­bers to dubi­ous­ly and deceit­ful­ly and dis­rep­utably add to the micro­scop­ic and non-scan­dalous 9000.  I mean, talk about lies and the lying liars who tell them!

What Does the Encyclopedia Really Say?

But is that in truth what has hap­pened?  For in the fol­low­ing pas­sage from the Ency­clo­pe­dia (about which the thor­ough Dr.* White says naughts and cross­es), we may read the fol­low­ing:

A [sect] is defined in this Ency­clo­pe­dia as an orga­nized aggre­gate of wor­ship cen­ters or con­gre­ga­tions of sim­i­lar eccle­si­as­ti­cal tra­di­tion with­in a spe­cif­ic coun­try … whose com­po­nent con­gre­ga­tions and mem­bers are called by the same [sec­tar­i­an] name in dif­fer­ent areas, regard­ing them­selves as one autonomous Chris­t­ian church dis­tinct from oth­er [sects], church­es[,] and tra­di­tions.

[In oth­er words, as long as they regard them­selves to be eccle­si­as­ti­cal­ly autonomous, they’re a sect.]

“As defined here, world Chris­tian­i­ty con­sists of 6 major eccle­si­as­ti­co-cul­tur­al blocs, divid­ed into 300 major eccle­si­as­ti­cal tra­di­tions, com­posed of over 33,000 dis­tinct [sects] in 238 coun­tries (Vol. I, p. 16).

Well, gol­ly.  Imag­ine that.  Turns out, the 33,000 fig­ure does not come from any shenani­gans of addi­tion engaged in by that shrewd and knav­ish sprite called Steven K. Ray. (As though Mr. Ray had been deliri­ous­ly comb­ing through the pages of the Ency­clo­pe­dia, shriek­ing, “Where can I find more? Where can I find more?”)  It actu­al­ly comes from the edi­tors of the Ency­clo­pe­dia itself.  But you’ll search in vain through Dr.* White’s attempt­ed evis­cer­a­tion of Mr. Ray for any men­tion of that. Naughts and cross­es.

The Ency­clo­pe­dia divides that num­ber thus:

Inde­pen­dents, ca. 22,000
Protes­tants, ca. 9000
Mar­gin­als, ca. 1600,
Ortho­dox, 781
Roman Catholics, 242
Angli­cans, 168

Totaled, this gives us a num­ber of about 33,791.  Remov­ing “Ortho­dox” and “Roman Catholic” from the list (did you catch that, Dr.* White?), we are left with a total of 32,768.  And what do you know? That is the exact num­ber I came up with, in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle, as the num­ber of Protes­tant sects at the end of 1997, giv­en the premise that the num­ber of sects has dou­bled every 32 years since 1517. Shaz­a­am!

Of course, Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min, etc., etc.) does seem to have a point when he says that only 9000 of these sects are grouped by the Ency­clo­pe­dia as Protes­tant. The very help­ful Phil Por­vaznik, how­ev­er, explains why in jus­tice “Inde­pen­dents” (and the oth­ers) can be includ­ed. (I’ll give you a hint:  Have you ever heard of an Inde­pen­dent Bap­tist? Would you con­sid­er them any­thing oth­er than Protes­tant?). Says Mr. Por­vaznik [his bold­ing]:

[I]f you look at the names of these “Inde­pen­dent” groups … you’ll see most of them are clear­ly Protes­tant (the “Apos­tolic,” the “Charis­mat­ic,” the “Full Gospel,” the house or home church­es, the pen­te­costals, prob­a­bly all the TV/radio Chris­tians, and all the Angli­cans, and schis­mat­ic Catholics among the “Inde­pen­dents.

He goes on; but as you can see, the dif­fer­ence here is not between hon­esty and dis­hon­esty with num­bers, or hon­esty and dis­hon­esty with a source (as Dr.* White likes to pre­tend).  The dif­fer­ence is in def­i­n­i­tions.  That is why Mr. Por­vaznik can include “schis­mat­ic Catholics” as Protes­tants.  An admit­ted­ly anec­do­tal exam­ple, but it has bear­ing:  I oft have heard fel­low Catholics refer to sede­va­can­tists as Protes­tant. The rea­son we say that is because sede­va­can­tists exhib­it a trait that we think of as quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Protes­tant:  the rejec­tion of the sin­gu­lar author­i­ty of the Church in favor of the author­i­ty of one­self.   At bot­tom, pri­vate judg­ment is more Protes­tant than sola scrip­tura is. Sede­va­can­tists call them­selves Catholic, but that’s self-deceit:  They’re Protes­tant.

I know that Dr.* White will protest—because he’s a protes­tant, and I’ve heard him do so—that, no, we do have the author­i­ty of Scrip­ture, and we have the less­er (fal­li­ble) author­i­ty of, for exam­ple, the 1689 Lon­don Bap­tist Con­fes­sion of Faith, or Calv­in’s Insti­tutes.  But in say­ing this, Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.) is only mak­ing my point for me.  In the end, he accepts those fal­li­ble author­i­ties because he has cho­sen to accept them, not by any man­date of God. And he accepts the Scrip­ture only inso­far as his own fal­li­ble intel­lect leads him to inter­pret its mean­ing. He’s dri­ving down a road with­out lanes, and that is when you get into wrecks.  When you peel away the lay­ers of excuse, you’ll dis­cov­er that the Protes­tant, at the end of the day, sub­mits only to the author­i­ty of his own intel­lect.

To assume that some­one isn’t Protes­tant because he does not call him­self Protes­tant, or because one Ency­clo­pe­di­a’s edi­tor does not clas­si­fy him thus, is to fall vic­tim to the error of nom­i­nal­ism.  For nom­i­nal­ism cuts both ways: How­ev­er much some­one calls him­self a Chris­t­ian, he may not be; how­ev­er much some­one denies he’s a Protes­tant, he may indeed be.

If Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.) wants to argue this point, he should do so with the under­stand­ing that what we’re talk­ing about are dif­fer­ences in how we define terms. It has noth­ing to do with one side being hon­est with the source mate­r­i­al and the oth­er being dis­hon­est.  Dr.* White should stop pre­tend­ing oth­er­wise, and he should stop pre­tend­ing to find absur­di­ty or false­hood lurk­ing with­in the wicked heart of every con­vert to the Catholic Church.

A Modest Proposal: The Formula of Original Sin

Accept­ing as giv­en the fig­ure of ca. 33,000 for 2001, I have searched, for some time now, for a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accu­rate for­mu­la for deter­min­ing the exact num­ber of Protes­tant sects on any giv­en day in his­to­ry from 1517 for­ward.  The Ency­clo­pe­dia—any encyclopedia—can only give esti­mates; but what the Catholic apol­o­gist should desire is pre­ci­sion.  That way, when con­front­ed by a rabid Protes­tant, he can be deal­ing in sci­en­tif­ic fact, not dis­putable con­jec­ture.  I gave the begin­nings of such a mod­el in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle.  How do my esti­mates fare in com­par­i­son to oth­er esti­mates from oth­er pub­lished sources?

Well, the Ency­clo­pe­dia above cit­ed gives a fig­ure, at the start of 2001, of 33,000.  My mod­el gives a fig­ure of 35,840.

Back in 1980, David Bar­rett, the edi­tor of the Ency­clo­pe­dia, had reached an esti­mate of 20,800.  Using my mod­el, I would arrive at a fig­ure of 24,064 for that year.

By 1985, accord­ing to the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Chris­tian­i­ty, Bar­rett had increased his esti­mate to 22,190.  My mod­el returns a fig­ure of 26,624 for that year.

In 1989, the Unit­ed Nations gave an esti­mate of “more than” 23,000 sects.  My mod­el returns a fig­ure of 28,672.

These are fair­ly close match­es. It is my belief, how­ev­er, that my sci­en­tif­ic mod­el returns the more accu­rate fig­ure, since it’s based upon the Law of Expo­nen­tial Growth, rather than the sub­jec­tive and flawed process of scour­ing the earth and count­ing sec­tar­i­an heads.  Using the process I described in my pre­vi­ous blog arti­cle, I labored hard and long to come up with a sin­gle math­e­mat­i­cal and sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly pre­cise for­mu­la for a cal­cu­la­tion of Protes­tant sects on any giv­en date.

It has been my labor under the sun.

Here it is:

• Let y = the pre­vi­ous year
• Let j = the Julian date of the cur­rent year
• Let z = 366 if the cur­rent year is a leap year; oth­er­wise, 365.

Then:

• First, solve for x, thus: x = (y — 1517) / 32
• Dis­re­gard any remain­der.

Then, to deter­mine the cur­rent num­ber of Protes­tant sects, solve for n thus:

n = 2^x + { [ y — (1517 + 32x) ] * [ 2^x / 32 ] } + { [ ( 2^x / 32 ) / z ] * j }

With this for­mu­la, you can deter­mine the exact num­ber of Protes­tant sects on any giv­en date in his­to­ry, past or future.

For exam­ple, if you want­ed to know how many Protes­tant sects there were on Novem­ber 5, 1955, you could find out. You’d plug in the num­bers thus:

x = (1954 — 1517) / 32, or 13.65625.

Dis­re­gard­ing the remain­der, that gives us a val­ue of x = 13.

Then we’d solve for n:

n = 2¹³ + { [ 1954 — (1517 + 32*13) ] * [ 2¹³ / 32 ] } + { [ ( 2¹³ / 32 ) / 365 ] * 309 }

Work out that entire cal­cu­la­tion, and you will dis­cov­er that the total num­ber of Protes­tant sects on Novem­ber 5, 1955, was 13,784.

And, if you want to know how many Protes­tant sects there will be on Octo­ber 31, 2017, the date when we will cel­e­brate 500 glo­ri­ous years of apos­ta­sy, you’ll be pleased to know that you can fig­ure that out as well.  On that glo­ri­ous day, the rebel­lion of Mar­tin Luther will have birthed as many as 53,075 sects. Even Dr. Emmett Brown is sur­prised by the results of this cal­cu­la­tion.

The prob­lem is, one day this kind of growth will be unsus­tain­able.  Come 2517, the 1000th anniver­sary of the Protes­tant Defor­ma­tion, there will be 2.7 bil­lion Protes­tant sects, unless the mer­ci­ful hand of God spare the world such evil.  There will come a day when Protes­tants will either cry uncle and come back home, or they will be destroyed by this expo­nen­tial and can­cer­ous cell divi­sion in the body of Christ.

I sub­mit that the for­mu­la giv­en above is more than a math­e­mat­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion.  It express­es, at bot­tom, the core rebel­lion, at the heart of man’s exis­tence, against the pur­pos­es of God.  It is the for­mu­la writ­ten with­in orig­i­nal sin.

But Seriously

Dave Arm­strong makes a seri­ous case that Catholic apol­o­gists make a mis­take when insist­ing too firm­ly upon a spe­cif­ic num­ber.  Exag­ger­a­tion and hyper­bole, and even saire, have their pur­pos­es. But ulti­mate­ly it is prob­lem­at­ic, accord­ing to Mr. Arm­strong, when one gets into “wrong­head­ed def­i­n­i­tions con­cern­ing [sects].”

Mr. Arm­strong and I might dis­agree about that. But he is right when he under­scores the point of the dis­cus­sion about sec­tar­i­an­ism, what­ev­er num­ber you set­tle on at the end of the day:

Protes­tant apol­o­gists like [Eric] Svend­sen and [James] White … have a huge prob­lem try­ing to bib­li­cal­ly jus­ti­fy … sec­tar­i­an­ism and in deter­min­ing the inter­nal caus­es of same [such as sola scrip­tura, pri­vate judg­ment, anti-sac­er­do­tal­ism, and so forth. … These prob­lems the Protes­tant apol­o­gist has] by no means ever resolved or even square­ly faced.

That is spot on. Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.) seems to walk through life with the assump­tion that, if he can just get the num­ber of sects low enough, he can sleep the sleep of the just.  Con­trari­wise, some Catholic apol­o­gists seem to feel that the high­er the num­ber, the greater the case against Protes­tantism they have.

But the fact is, St. Paul says that there is one Church.  Does it real­ly mat­ter whether there are 48,500 sects, or 9000, or two?  There is one Church.  The Scrip­tures con­tin­u­al­ly warn us against any divi­sion in the body of Christ.  This is not to sug­gest that we should warm to any heresy under the sun for the sake of uni­ty.  But it is to sug­gest that the Protes­tant apol­o­gist per­haps should con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that God, being of infi­nite knowl­edge, knows the self-deceit that lives in the heart of man, and has set up a safe­guard to keep the body of Christ uni­fied in one judg­ment. That safe­guard is infal­li­bil­i­ty.

Is that real­ly so dif­fi­cult to con­sid­er?