Catholics and Protestants: What Can We Learn from Each Other? by Peter Kreeft

(New York: Ignatius Press, 2017), 206

Notes


Contents


Introduction

  • "We cannot see much of the 'big picture' that is God's providential design for the healing and reuniting of His church. We do not understand how He is doing it but we can see that He is doing something today that was never done before: Protestants and Catholics are sincerely loving and listening to each other. What will happen next? God only knows." (9)
  • "Both-and" rather than "either-or" (11)
  • "So here, right up front, is my master argument for Catholic thought: It is catholic. Catholics believe everything in the Bible, including the "Protestant" stuff. Lutherans may believe in Galatians versus James, faith versus works, but Catholics believe both. Calvinists may believe in predestination versus free will and Arminians in free will versus predesti-nation, but Catholics, like Augustine and Aquinas, believe both. Whatever truths Protestantism teaches, Catholicism also teaches. Catholicism is inclusive, not exclusive. It does not like words like "merely" or "only" or sola. Sola scriptura, sola fide, and sola gratia were the three slogans of the Reformation—as if scripture excluded Tradition instead of presupposing it and referring to it and affirming it; and as if faith excluded works instead of necessarily producing the works of charity by its very essence, as mothers produce babies; and as if grace set aside nature and human nature rather than using and perfecting nature (and natural reason)." (11)
  • "This book is not about apologetics but about ecumenism." (11)

1. A Lutheran Parable

2. Why the Reformation Is Over

3. How Catholics Should Think about Protestants

4. How Not to Think about Reunion

5. What Happens in Individuals Who "Ecumenize"?

  • "Catholics discover the fire, and Protestants discover the fireplace. Catholics discover the essence of Evangelical Protestantism; a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Protestants discover the essence of Catholicism; Christ's own visible, tangible Body, both as a living institution with teaching authority and as a real literal personal presence in the Eucharist." (29)

6. The Greatest Confession of Failure in Church History

7. Catholic versus Protestant Perspectives on Tradition and Scripture

  • "It is a package deal: either both scripture and authoritative apostolic Tradition are infallible, or neither is. Each appeals to and depends on the other...The Bible appeals to the authority of Tradition and Tradition appeals to the authority of the Bible." (38)

8. Coming Home: A Protestant-Catholic Dialogue

9. What Is the Eucharist?

  • If you are unsure about the Eucharist, pray the prayer he gives on 54-55

10. My First Original Evangelical Thought and My First Original Catholic Thought

  • A child's wisdom: "Well we just have to ask Jesus what he wants us to do and then do it all the time." (57)

11. Who Has the "Full Gospel"?

  • When a Protestant becomes a Catholic, he loses nothing positive in Protestantism, but perfects it. (61)
  • What we don’t know for sure should not define our faith. (64)

12. Passion

  • Reunion must be for the sake of truth…and truth is a divine person. (70)
  • We must be with him when he prays Jn-17 (71)

13. Three Reasons for Reunion

  • Three reasons for unity: (73)
    • Christ demands it
    • The church demands is
    • The world needs it

14. The Goal of the Reformation

15. Stereotypes and Caricatures

  • We have to forget our caricatures and listed to each other. (80)

16. The Plant Metaphor Applied to Ecumenism

  • The danger in Protestantism is to have a religion that is a soul without a body. The danger in Catholicism is superstition, or having a body without a soul. (82-83)

    17. Do We Dare to Hope for Reunion?

  • We must dare to hope that Christ’s broken body may be made visibly one again for the same reason because we are commanded to hope and pray for that because he did in Jn-17. (84)

    18. Sorting Out the Positives

  • Our approach to ecumenism should: (86 )

    • Understand the disagreements
    • List the agreements
    • Understand the differences that are not negatives and long for what the other has
  • The genius of Christianity is it’s ability to reconcile opposites in a higher synthesis that mitigates neither but perfects both. (87)

19. Two Ladies: A Parable

20. Jesus and Mary

  • Each of the Catholic teachings about Mary is centered on Christ, not on Mary. (90)
  • The positive of data about Mary in scripture is logically compatible with both Protestant and Catholic theologies. (93)

21. The Protestant Reformation Has Happened in the Catholic Church

22. A Little Comic Relief

23. Sorting Things Out Among Converts and Their Motives

  • It is terribly important to know the objective truth about God and his will for us. But it is also terribly important to have the right human will, the right motive. (103)
  • Reunion will not be attained if we work for it as our end fundamental motive for that as idolatry…So the shortest way to reunion is to love God and then we love reunion, and to love reunion only because we love God. (104)
  • In essential unity and non-essential diversity and in all things charity. (105)
  • If we all became brilliant theologians, reunion would still be far away. If we all became saints, it would be at our doorstep. (106)

24. Sorting Out the Issues in "Comparative Religions"

  • The differences between different types of Protestants are far greater than the differences between the orthodox Protestants and orthodox Catholics. (109)

25. Names

26. Historical Perspectives (from the Future) on the Reformation

27. What Will Make Good Protestants Come Home?

  • When Catholics learn the evangelical principle, many Protestants will come home…When more than just a minority of Catholics remember their first love, more than just a minority of Protestants will come home. And then both sides will win. (116)

28. Mary

  • The Protestant objection to Mary seems to presuppose a very bad theological principle that Grace and nature, God and man are rivals (127)

29. Evangelism

  • If Catholics do not know the importance of evangelism as well as Protestants do, that tragedy is a key part of the division in the Body of Christ, because evangelizing is as much an essential aspect of one true Church as teaching. (143)
  • To win the world, we have to be saints. (146)

30. Ecumenism and World Religions

  • Christ the Lord is the nonnegotiable center in essence of Christianity. So the only way a Christian can possibly conceive of unifying all the religions of the world is by the world’s conversion to Christ. (150)
  • The way to true unity must always be truth, not compromise. (152)
  • Christ’s solution to the "problem of comparative religions" is conversion to Him…The whole world will become Christian only when Christian’s become saints. (155)
  • If all light is from the one Christ, it follows that insofar as non-Christian religions fully follow their light, they must eventually meet and come together with each other and with Christianity, since all light comes from the same single source. (156)
  • Judaism is unique because it is the first part of the one divinely revealed road down the mountain rather than one of the many man-made roads up. (159-160)
  • The Universality of Christ: Thus, this scandalous "one way" doctrine of Jn-14 is inclusive, not exclusive. Christ is not confined to Christianity; He moves also beyond it. But Christianity is confined to Christ; it does not move beyond Him. There is more to Christ than Christianity, but there is no more to Christianity than Christ. (163)
  • Protestants who make this "inclusive" point are usually liberals, and Protestants who make this "exclusive" point usually tend to fundamentalism. Catholics transcend both because they have a stronger and older tradition of connecting them: e.g., the works of Saint Justin Martyr, Saint Clement of Alexandria, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint John Paul II (see Dominus lesus). (163)
  • Christ is the way and the truth and the life that all religions teach. Insofar as they teach goodness, truth, and beauty, they teach Christ. Thus, religious universalism, or inclusivism, and Christian particularism, or exclusivism, are not mutually contradictory but mutually complementary…As Christ fulfills all the truths in other religions, Catholicism fulfills all the truths in Protestant “mere Christianity”. (See the long last chapter of Handbook of Catholic Apologetics) (166-167)

31. The Church

32. The Bible

  • The most important principle of hermeneutics is to will God's will. (195)
  • The Word of God says that "the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow" (Heb-04). If we are saints, that sword pierces our heart and draws blood. To be a saint is to fall on that sword and die to yourself. That is the only right suicide, and the only right hermeneutics. And only when both Protestants and Catholics see the distinction between saints and scholars as more important than the distinction between Protestants and Catholics will they come together in interpreting their common Bible. (196)

33. The Catholic Jesus versus the Protestant Jesus

34. The Bottom Line

  • The only non-reductive "only" is Jesus. (201)

Conclusion

  • Only the fire of saintly love is hot enough to fuse us together. (203)
  • So what are you going to do about it? (204)

Conclusion

Topic: Ecumenism

Source

Created: 2026-07-24-Fri
Updated: 2026-08-04-Tue