The real threat. . .

I find it interesting that there are actually Roman Catholics who think that Protestantism is the greatest threat to Christianity and Protestants (and Lutherans) who think that the Pope is the greatest threat to the faith.  How utterly ridiculous to presume that the Reformation sparked the end of Christianity or that it represents the defeat of the devil incarnate.  It ought to be pretty clear by now that the real problem faced by both Protestants and Roman Catholics is modernism.

There was a time when modernism was uniformly identified by Protestants and Roman Catholics as a demon threatening the life and health of the Church.  It would seem from the way Protestantism has gone and the way the current Pope speaks that those who went before us had it wrong.  Modernism is no longer a threat and has become the savior of the Christian future.  Pius X oonce wrote in Pascendi a clear and urgent warning against modernism.  He condemned the entire system of modernism as “the synthesis (collection) of all heresies” (omnium haereseon conlectum).  It is not simply the abandonment of parts or even all the faith but the corruption of it and the replacement of God's revelation for man's delusion.  Unlike Protestantism which clears branches (rightly or wrongly from the tree of Christianity), modernism has laid an axe to the very roots of the faith and therefore the Church.  The embrace of modernism by both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism is the equivalent of ecclesiastical suicide -- something we Lutherans have already seen in the empty churches and empty theology of the progressive and radical left in our circles as well.

Christianity has not guarded the back door very well and what was once warned against has crept into our lives and faith without an open debate.  Instead, it has stealthily positioned its own ideology in place of God's revelation until we no longer even consider God's Word to be anything more than an opinion or vote of which our own judgment and ballot can reject or change.  Unless Protestantism awakens to the threat and grows a backbone, it will cease to speak any differently than the world and culture around it.  Unless Rome awakens to this threat, it will not simply become Protestant but will lie in the coffin of our own delusions along with Protestantism and it all begins with the rejection of God's Word and the assumption of the seat of judgment over it and all truth.

The catechetical, liturgical, doctrinal, and moral chaos of the Church today is not answered by arguing over each individual issue but by recognizing the attack modernism has made upon the very trunk and root of the faith.  We cannot repair the corruption by fighting over what marriage is or the pleasure purpose of sex or abortion or transgenderism.  Note, I do not mean to say that we should surrender to the opinions of the world and modernity but that the attack will not be successful until we attach the source of it all.  It is not that we should be silent in the face of these individual incursions into God's domain but that these cannot be addressed individually without first attacking the source of this evil.  Modernism is not simply the advance of ideas in conflict with God's will and purpose but the replacement of God's voice with another.  It is much more and much worse.  It is the substitution of the window God has provided with a mirror that only reflects our weakness back to us, the revelation of God's Word and truth for a sounding gong of human opinion.  It all begins with the denial that God made us, that life is not simply His creation but His domain, and with the arrogant presumption that the recipients of His mercy and sit in judgment over it.  Sadly, the leaders of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism have not merely failed to warn against modernism but have become themselves its voices and warriors.