The Protestant’s Dilemma by Devin Rose: A review.

f a Protes­tant look­ing into the claims of Catholi­cism were to ask me, “What one book should I read, where I can find a quick answer to any ques­tion I have?” I would tell him to read Devin Rose’s new book The Protes­tant’s Dilem­ma (buy here). I would also rec­om­mend this book to Protes­tant apol­o­gists, even those of many years, well-skilled in polemics. It will remind them of the heavy bur­den of proof they face, and the weak­ness of their posi­tion on point after point. The truth may set them free and bring them home too. (It has hap­pened.)

All this may seem like overstatement—the oblig­a­tory praise from one Catholic blog­ger to anoth­er. But it is not.

Con­sid­er first the range of issues this book takes up. There are thir­ty-six chap­ters, each one on a dif­fer­ent top­ic, from the papa­cy to sola scrip­tura, from the canon of the Bible to Pur­ga­to­ry, from con­fes­sion to Eucharist to infant bap­tism. If some­thing about the Catholic Church trou­bles you, this book has the answer. If you think you have found the point on which Catholi­cism fails, this book will show you why it is one more point upon which Protes­tantism fails.

Con­sid­er also the brevi­ty. The book is just over 200 pages long, which means that Mr. Rose’s answers get to the root of the ques­tion with­out a knot of aca­d­e­m­ic detail. That is hard­er to do than it might seem, which is why primers always get writ­ten by peo­ple who have spent a great deal of time think­ing things through, and who know how to write. This is the book of a man who has spent a long time study­ing the ques­tions that divide Protes­tants and Catholics, and who knows how to present his case in a way that is easy for any­one to under­stand. At the same time, the book is use­ful for the pro­fes­sion­al apol­o­gist, for it recalls his mind to the basics.

Mr. Rose’s sig­na­ture style is to take what Protes­tants claim and fol­low it through to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion. By doing so, he reveals to the read­er those con­se­quences that apol­o­gists sel­dom want to admit, or even flat-out deny. On top of that, in each chap­ter Mr. Rose uses antithe­sis in order to prove the Catholic claim. Thus each one is divid­ed into two sec­tions: (1) If Protes­tantism is true, then x; (2) Because Catholi­cism is true, then y. At the end, y always comes out the stronger of the two.

As just one exam­ple of this, we should look at how Mr. Rose han­dles the ques­tion of authority—in a chap­ter of less than six pages. Author­i­ty may be the one thing that most divides Catholics from Protes­tants. The Protes­tant looks to the Bible alone to tell him what is true. The Catholic looks to both the Bible and the teach­ing of the Church.

“If Protes­tantism is true,” chap­ter 12 begins, “we all decide for our­selves what God’s rev­e­la­tion means.”

No Protes­tant will want to admit this. We do not decide for our­selves, he would say; the Bible is our guide. We are bound by what it says. But in one para­graph—one para­graph, think about that!—Mr. Rose shows why such a claim is false in prac­tice:

If, as Protes­tants believe, the Bible is the sole infal­li­ble rule of faith, God must have ensured that its mean­ing, at least on issues essen­tial to sal­va­tion, would be clear to any Chris­t­ian who reads it. He could not have allowed the Bible to be mys­te­ri­ous, obscure, or even slight­ly vague—even to peo­ple who weren’t flu­ent in Greek or Hebrew. This clar­i­ty would ensure uni­ty of doc­trine among all Bible-believ­ing Chris­tians through­out time. As we have seen, though, such uni­ty does not exist. This is because, in the absence of an inter­pret­ing author­i­ty, every per­son is left to decide Scrip­ture’s mean­ing for him­self.

The West­min­ster Con­fes­sion of Faith speaks of the “per­spicu­ity” of Scrip­ture, which means that the Bible is clear to any who take it up. If any one pas­sage is not clear, relat­ed pas­sages will clear it up for us. But to show why this is false, Mr. Rose cites two vers­es from 1 John. On the sur­face, they seem to be at odds with each oth­er; he uses them to show why the Protes­tant is ulti­mate­ly left to him­self to decide how to rec­on­cile them.

1 John 1:8 says that if we have no sin we deceive our­selves; but 1 John 3:6 says that if we remain in Christ we do not sin. Does that mean that no one remains in Christ? The West­min­ster for­mu­la can not tell us how to square the two. Each of us must make up his own answer.

The chap­ter con­tin­ues:

Because Catholi­cism is true, the Bible was not intend­ed to be stud­ied in iso­la­tion from the Apos­tolic Tra­di­tion and apart from the teach­ing author­i­ty of Christ’s Church.

Mr. Rose shows how Catholic tradition—in par­tic­u­lar, the dis­tinc­tion between mor­tal and venial sin—helps to explain the two pas­sages in a way that does not leave each of us to his own fal­li­ble author­i­ty, and which main­tains the uni­ty of the faith and the uni­ty of the body as Christ intend­ed. Christ did not mean to leave us to our own flawed intel­lect. He did not aban­don us to divi­sion.

I wish I had had this book three years ago when I was on my way home to the Catholic Church. I had to piece togeth­er the proofs of Catholic teach­ing from a vari­ety of sources, but Mr. Rose’s book con­tains all the issues that I strug­gled with in a sin­gle place. More­over, it has the great strength of fol­low­ing Protes­tant claims to their log­i­cal con­se­quences. It does not mere­ly show why Catholi­cism is true, but also why Protes­tantism can not be true.

If you are a Protes­tant, and think­ing about com­ing home to the Catholic Church; or, if you are a Catholic who wants to under­stand bet­ter how to defend your faith to your Protes­tant friends, then you must get this book and read this book today. You can also vis­it Mr. Rose’s blog here.