They Do the Roman Thing and Deny the Roman Word

I have spent my whole Christian life among Baptists who define themselves against Rome. Non-conformists, they call themselves, heirs of the men who would not bow to a pope or a bishop or a state church, and every one of them will tell you plainly that Rome is the great counterfeit. I believed that self-description for decades, because I was raised inside it and it never occurred to me to check it. And I want to tell you what I finally noticed after all those years in the pews. The most Roman churches I have ever known are Baptist churches. They do the Roman thing and deny the Roman word, and the denial changes nothing but the vocabulary.

Here is the principle that opened my eyes. If you want to know what a church actually believes, do not read its statement of faith. Watch what it does. What a church performs in worship is its truest confession, deeper and more honest than anything printed in the back of the bulletin, because the body does not lie. When the practice and the paper disagree, the practice is the real belief, and the paper is the alibi.

So watch the practice. There is a clergy caste and a laity caste, though the words are never used. One class of men handles the holy things and the other class receives them, and everyone knows which class he belongs to, and no one crosses the line. Rome calls that a priesthood. The Baptist denies the word while maintaining the thing. Then notice that no man may teach unless the authorization has been granted through the proper channel, ordained hands laid on by other ordained hands, validity flowing down the approved line. Rome calls that holy orders and apostolic succession. The Baptist denies the words while running the system. And Peter wrote to ordinary scattered believers, not to a caste: But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9). Paul described a gathering where every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine (1 Corinthians 14:26). The New Testament church was participatory from wall to wall. The caste came later, and it came from the very city these churches claim to have fled.

And it goes further. Let a layman write something true, and watch what happens to it. The book does not count, however faithful its doctrine, until a clergyman blesses it. Truth itself is treated as unauthorized until the teaching class stamps it. Rome has a word for a teaching class whose approval makes doctrine official. She calls it the magisterium. The Baptist denies the word while enforcing the thing, and a layman with an open Bible feels the enforcement quickly, no matter how carefully he writes.

But the place where the body tells the truth most loudly is the Lord's table. I have watched it many times. The silver trays polished to a shine. The special table with the special cloth, carved with This do in remembrance of me. The funeral silence over the whole room. The ushers marching in step, turning in step, seated in lockstep like an honor guard. The same fixed words in the same order every time, the whole solemn machine run once for the bread and then run again for the wine. Ask the pastor what is happening and he will tell you it is a bare memorial, a symbol only, nothing like Rome's altar. But nobody marches in step to remember a metaphor. You do not hang a sign reading NOT AN ALTAR on a kitchen table. You hang it on an altar. The mouth says memorial, and the body performs a mass, and the body is the honest one. The reverence outran the theology years ago and has been telling the truth on the whole room ever since.

And notice this about the denial itself. The louder and more often a church insists it is nothing like Rome, the more the insisting says. A man does not spend his life denying what no one would ever suspect. The denial is not evidence against the diagnosis. The denial is the diagnosis.

The history makes it bitter. The non-conformist tradition exists because men refused to ask the establishment's permission to preach. Bunyan sat twelve years in a Bedford jail because he would not stop preaching without a license, and the men who jailed him said exactly what the caste says now: no one may teach unless the proper authority has authorized him. That is the club the bishops swung at our fathers. And the heirs of the jailed men now swing the same club at laymen, in churches with Bunyan on the shelf. They kept every load-bearing wall of Rome, the caste, the succession, the magisterium, the altar, and threw out only the brick with the pope's name on it, and then called the building Protestant. They did not reform Rome. They franchised it.

And here I will confess a joke I sometimes tell myself, the kind that is only funny because it is true. There are days I think I would rather sit in an actual Roman Catholic church, because in Rome's building I would be farther from the pope. Theirs is an ocean away in another country. In some sovereign grace Baptist churches he is ten feet from the front pew, and there is no college of cardinals to slow him down.

Now let me say clearly whom I am not writing about. I am not writing about the people in those pews, and mostly not about the men in those pulpits either, for most of them inherited the building exactly as I did and have never once seen its floor plan from outside. I sat in the system for decades and called it normal, and no one had to deceive me into it, because it was simply the water I swam in. The target of this article is not a person. The target is the structure, which harms the very sheep it claims to protect, and harms the men it elevates too.

Because here is what the structure costs. It puts a caste between a sinner and his God, and there is no caste there. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). One mediator. Not a mediator and his authorized franchisees. Every believer is a priest in the only priesthood the New Testament knows, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:5). And the great High Priest has thrown the way open Himself: Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16). Come boldly. No trays, no marching, no license, no caste, no stamp from the teaching class. The veil tore top to bottom two thousand years ago, and no committee has ever been authorized to sew it back up.

Grace and Peace, Brandan