# Five Walls Between Us and the Room We Already Share At a wedding in rural Ireland a few years ago, I watched a Catholic priest and a Church of Ireland rector argue for forty minutes about whether the bride's grandmother could receive communion. The grandmother, eighty-three, sat in the front pew looking quietly amused. She had survived a famine family, a civil war, and six decades of Irish religious politics. She already knew something both clergymen were still working out: that the argument was real, and that it was not the whole story. I have thought about that grandmother a great deal in the years since. She is, I think, a better guide than most theologians to what Catholic-Protestant relations should look like in a culture that no longer remembers why Christians ever split, and increasingly does not care. ## The Ecumenism Nobody Wants There are two bad options on offer. The first is a sentimental ecumenism that smooths everything over in the name of love. Doctrine becomes embarrassing; the Reformation becomes a misunderstanding; five hundred years of bloodshed, martyrdom, and serious theological labour become a regrettable Victorian costume drama. Everyone hugs. Nobody believes anything specific enough to be wrong about, and so nobody believes anything specific enough to be right about either. This is not unity. It is amnesia with a smile. The second option is tribal hostility — the inherited reflex of suspicion that treats the other tradition as scarcely Christian at all. Protestants who think Catholics worship Mary and have never read a sentence of Aquinas. Catholics who think Protestants are spiritual freelancers with no liturgy and no history. Both caricatures are tedious, both are wrong, and both are sustained mostly by people who have not actually sat in the other's pews, eaten with the other's families, or read the other's better writers. I want to argue for a third way, which is older than both of these: honest difference as the only path to honest unity. The walls between Catholics and Protestants are real. There are at least five of them, and they are not trivial. But the room we already share is so much larger than most outside observers — and a fair number of insiders — realise. We need to be able to say both things without flinching. ## The Room We Already Share Before the walls, the room. Catholics and Protestants confess the Nicene Creed. We worship one God in three Persons. We believe that the eternal Son took on human flesh in the womb of a Jewish woman in a particular town in a particular year, that he lived, taught, healed, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, was buried, and rose bodily from the dead on the third day. We believe he ascended, reigns, and will return to judge the living and the dead. We believe the Holy Spirit is poured out on the church. We believe in the forgiveness of sins and the life of the world to come. We share Scripture. The canonical disagreement over the deuterocanonical books is real but narrower than people think — both traditions read Genesis, Isaiah, the Gospels, Romans, and Revelation as the authoritative word of God. We share a moral tradition built on the Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, and the apostolic letters. We share a basic anthropology: human beings made in God's image, fallen, redeemable only through grace. And — this needs saying loudly — we share the conviction that salvation is by grace. The 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, stated that "by grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God." That is not a small sentence. Five hundred years ago people were burned alive over claims very close to it. A secular friend of mine, hearing me describe this once over coffee in Shoreditch, said, "Wait — so you basically believe the same things?" I had to say: in the most important sense, yes. And then in the next most important sense, no. The "yes" is the room. The "no" is the walls. ## Wall One — Authority: Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium The first wall is the question of where teaching authority finally rests. The Protestant principle of *sola scriptura* says that Scripture is the supreme rule of faith — the norm that norms all other norms. Tradition is honoured, creeds are received, councils are weighed, but every one of them stands under the judgement of the written word of God. The Catholic position is that Scripture and apostolic Tradition together constitute the deposit of faith, and that the Magisterium — the teaching office of the church, with the bishop of Rome at its head — is the authoritative interpreter of both. This is not a misunderstanding waiting to be cleared up. It is a genuine structural difference about how God speaks and through whom. Honest engagement with it means letting the difficult voices speak from both sides. Augustine wrote, "I would not believe the gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so" — a sentence Catholics quote with satisfaction and Protestants find awkward. Augustine also wrote at length on the sufficiency and supremacy of Scripture in ways that anticipate Reformation arguments. John Henry Newman, walking from Canterbury to Rome in the nineteenth century, said famously that "to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant." A bracing claim. Protestants must take it seriously and answer it; we cannot simply roll our eyes. The Catholic side has its own problem, though. If the Magisterium is the authoritative interpreter, who interprets the Magisterium? And what happens when popes contradict each other, as historically they have? The Protestant insists that the word of God must finally be able to correct the church — including its bishops, including its councils, including, when necessary, the pope. Otherwise the church is accountable only to itself, which is not a position any institution flourishes in for long. This is a real wall. It does not come down by being polite about it. ## Wall Two, Justification: Forensic Declaration or Transformative Process The second wall is the one Luther hit his head against in the tower at Wittenberg. When God justifies a sinner, what is happening? The classical Protestant answer, sharpened by Luther, systematised by Calvin, is that justification is a forensic act, a legal declaration. God credits to the believer the righteousness of Christ. The sinner remains, in this life, *simul justus et peccator*, simultaneously justified and a sinner. The righteousness is imputed, reckoned, accounted. Sanctification, the actual moral transformation of the believer, is a separate work of the Spirit, real but distinct. The Catholic answer is that justification is the actual making-righteous of the sinner. Grace is infused, not merely imputed. The believer is genuinely transformed, and this transformation is itself part of justification, not subsequent to it. The Council of Trent anathematised the Protestant formulation; the Protestants returned the favour. The Joint Declaration of 1999 narrowed this gap in ways that should not be underestimated. Both sides now affirm that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works, and that good works flow from this grace rather than earning it. That is a genuine convergence and worth honouring. The gap has not closed, however. The Catholic still believes in the increase of justification through the sacraments, in purgatorial purification after death for those not yet fully sanctified, and in a synergy between grace and human cooperation that most Protestants find too generous to fallen nature. The Protestant still insists, with Paul in Romans 4, that God "justifies the ungodly", that the verdict is pronounced over sinners who remain, until glory, sinners. This wall is lower than it was in 1546. It is not gone. ## Wall Three, The Eucharist: Presence, Sacrifice, and the Table That Divides The third wall is the altar. Which is to say, the table. Catholic teaching holds that in the Mass the bread and wine are transubstantiated, their substance becomes the body and blood of Christ, while their accidents (taste, appearance, chemistry) remain those of bread and wine. The Mass is, further, a true sacrifice, not a re-killing of Christ, but a sacramental re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Calvary, made present on every altar where the priest stands *in persona Christi*. Protestants splinter here, which is itself part of the problem. Lutherans speak of a real presence "in, with, and under" the elements. Calvinists speak of a spiritual presence received by faith. Zwinglians and most modern evangelicals speak of a memorial meal. Across these positions, though, Protestants share two refusals: they refuse the philosophical machinery of transubstantiation (substance and accidents drawn from Aristotle), and they refuse the language of sacrifice, which they read as compromising the once-for-all completion of Christ's work on the cross, "It is finished" (John 19:30); "by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified" (Heb. 10:14). It is tempting for Protestants to mock transubstantiation as medieval superstition. I think this is lazy and wrong. The Catholic doctrine is a coherent sacramental logic, working out the implications of Christ's words "this is my body" with a metaphysical seriousness that most Protestants have never matched. We may think it is mistaken, I do, but it deserves to be answered, not sneered at. What the Catholic position must answer in turn is the strangeness, given Hebrews, of the language of sacrifice attached to anything happening on an altar today. And the pastoral tragedy: that the meal Jesus instituted as the sign of his people's unity has become, for a thousand years, the sharpest sign of our division. The grandmother in the front pew knew this. So did the priest. So did the rector. None of them had a solution. ## Wall Four, Mary and the Saints: Intercession and the Risk of a Crowded Heaven The fourth wall is the one that most divides ordinary believers, because it is the most visible. Walk into a Catholic church and you will see statues, candles, side altars to Mary and to the saints. You will hear prayers asking the saints to intercede. You will encounter, in formal Catholic dogma, four Marian teachings: her perpetual virginity, her divine motherhood (*Theotokos*), her Immaculate Conception, and her bodily Assumption. The last two are dogmas defined in 1854 and 1950 respectively, within recent memory, by historical standards. Protestants find this difficult. Sometimes for bad reasons, a residual iconoclasm that confuses bareness with holiness. Often, though, for good ones, rooted in 1 Timothy 2:5: "There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." The Protestant concern is not that Catholics worship Mary, informed Catholics do not, and the distinction between *latria* (worship due to God alone) and *dulia* (honour due to saints) is real and serious. The concern is that in popular piety the distinction collapses, and that even at its most disciplined, a heaven crowded with intercessors can obscure the direct access to the Father that Hebrews 4:16 promises every believer through Christ. I will not mock Catholic devotion to Mary. I have stood in the basilica at Knock and watched old women pray with a tenderness I recognised as Christian. Whatever I think of the theology, I will not patronise the prayer. What I will say is this: the New Testament's reticence about Mary after Acts 1 is conspicuous. Paul, writing the great soteriological letters, does not mention her. Peter does not mention her. John, who took her into his home, does not name her in his Gospel and never invokes her in his letters. A movement that began with the church's earliest writers saying almost nothing about her has ended in dogmas that bind every Catholic conscience. The Protestant question is whether the development has outrun its source. This wall too is real. It is also, of all the walls, the one most likely to dissolve in the next life, when we will see the mother of our Lord face to face and finally be able to ask her what she thinks. ## Wall Five, The Church: Institution, Hierarchy, and the Bishop of Rome The fifth wall is the one that makes institutional reunion structurally hardest. The Catholic Church teaches that Christ founded a visible, hierarchical, sacramental church, governed by bishops in apostolic succession, with the bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, as the visible head and, under defined conditions, the infallible teacher. Vatican I in 1870 defined papal infallibility *ex cathedra*. Vatican II in the 1960s softened the rhetoric but retained the substance. The Protestant traditions, in their varied ways, deny this. Some retain bishops (Anglicans, Lutherans); some do not (Presbyterians, Baptists, congregationalists). All deny, however, that any bishop, including the bishop of Rome, has universal jurisdiction over the whole church, or that any human teacher can speak infallibly. The Reformers read the New Testament and saw a church governed by elders, with Christ alone as head and the Spirit speaking through the word. This is the wall I find hardest to write about honestly, because Protestants here have a genuine problem of our own. We have produced, in five hundred years, somewhere between thirty thousand and forty thousand denominations, depending on how you count. We have splintered over baptism, polity, worship style, eschatology, the role of women, the role of the Spirit, and the colour of the carpet. When the Catholic asks what the visible unity of the church looks like under a Protestant ecclesiology, we do not have a good answer. We have a thousand answers, which is worse than having none. The Catholic answer, one shepherd, one fold, one chair, has at least the dignity of coherence. Whether it is what Christ founded is another question. I do not think it is. But the Protestant must own the mess that came with our refusal. ## Why the Watching City Needs This Argument Done Well I pastor a church in London. The city outside my window contains drug dealers and economists, billionaires and asylum seekers, more than three hundred languages, and a thousand sub-cultures that barely know the others exist. Most of the people in this city think Christianity is a single, dying thing. They do not know there are Catholics and Protestants. If you told them, they would not care. This is the context in which our argument has to be conducted, and it changes the stakes. A church that pretends the walls do not exist will produce nothing in this city but vague spiritual feeling, and vague spiritual feeling does not stand up to the pressures of late-modern London. A church that lets the walls become hostility will offer the city a spectacle of Christian tribalism that confirms its worst suspicions about religion. Neither will preach the gospel. What the city needs is something harder and rarer: Catholics and Protestants who can stand side by side in the food bank, the prison chaplaincy, the school board, and the public square, agreeing on the Nicene Creed and disagreeing on the Eucharist, and not pretending either is the smaller thing. It needs a church that holds conviction and communion together, that does not flatten difference but does not weaponise it. When I have seen this, and I have, occasionally, in this city, it is one of the most evangelistically powerful things I know. Outsiders can tell the difference between people who agree because they have given up caring and people who disagree but love each other. Only the second is interesting. Only the second looks like the kingdom. ## The Grandmother in the Front Pew The argument at the Irish wedding ended, as far as I could tell, in a draw. The grandmother received a blessing rather than communion, which seemed to satisfy the rector and not quite satisfy the priest, and certainly not satisfy her. After the service she found me at the bar and, without preamble, said: "They love the Lord, both of them. They just love him out of different cupboards." I have thought about that sentence for years. It is not theologically precise. It will not pass an ordination exam in either tradition. It does not resolve any of the five walls I have just described, and the grandmother would not have wanted it to. But it knows something. It knows that the room we share is real, that the walls in the room are real, and that the people on both sides of every wall are the people of the same Lord. The clergymen were arguing about whether she could come to the table. She was already at the table. She had been at the table for sixty years. She was just waiting for them to notice. Hold the convictions. Tear down nothing that Scripture builds. But for the love of Christ and the sake of the watching city, keep eating together where you can. "That they may all be one... So that the world may believe" (John 17:21).