BY CLIFFORD GOLDSTEIN
From The Great Compromise, by Clifford Goldstein. Copyright © by Pacific Press® Publishing Association, Napa Idaho. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
ne of the most famous experiments in scientific history involved a cat. Schrödinger’s cat.
The feline was placed in a sealed box with some radioactive
material, a device for detecting radioactive decay, poison gas safely stashed
in a glass container, and a hammer poised over the glass. The detector was switched
on long enough to create a 50/50 chance that one atom in the radioactive material
would decay. If so, the detector would record the activity, causing the hammer
to smash the glass, which would release the gas and kill the cat. If the atom
didn’t decay, the detector would not trigger the hammer, the poison would remain
in the container, and Schrödinger’s cat would live to see another day.
Because radioactive decay occurs at the quantum level—the
level of individual atoms, photons, and sub-atomic entities, where events are
purely random and predictable only in a statistical sense—no way existed to
know, for sure, what happened to the cat except by opening the box. The scientist
would have to look inside; only then could he know the feline’s fate.
According to quantum physics, however, things aren’t
that simple. Quantum physics (or at least one interpretation of it) suggests
that until the box is opened and a person looks inside, the cat exists in a
“superposition of states,” [i] a sort of limbo in which the
cat is neither dead or alive. Not until someone actually views the cat does
it become one or the other, that is, dead or alive. According to this theory,
the very act of looking changes reality and creates either a live cat (if the
atom didn’t decay) or a dead one (if the atom did). Either way, the fate of
the cat isn’t actually determined until someone looks at it.
“Quantum theory,” wrote mathematical physicist
Paul Davies, “requires that the system develops into a ghost-like hybrid state
of live-dead cat until an observation is made, when either a live or
dead cat will be perceived.”[ii]
This idea is, of course, ridiculous. Looking
at the cat isn’t going to change it. The cat is either dead or alive before
the box is opened. Observation reveals only what’s already there; it doesn’t
alter it. The whole point of the experiment with Schrödinger’s cat was, in fact,
to express the absurdity of this concept (known as the Copenhagen Interpretation)
regarding what happens in the quantum realm—the realm of photons, electrons,
and sub-atomic particles.
Unfortunately, detailed and rigorous experiments
have proven that the observation and measurement of sub-atomic entities do,
indeed, change them. Sub-atomic particles don’t even seem to exist until someone
observes or measures them! However absurd, however offensive to common sense,
reality in the atomic and subatomic world appears so fragile, transitory, and
statistical that humans can’t measure or even view it without fundamentally
changing what they measure or view.
Take light. Since the days of Isaac Newton,
scientists have argued over whether light is a wave or a particle. In 1803,
Thomas Young performed experiments that “proved” light was a wave. A century
later, Albert Einstein performed experiments that “proved” light was a particle.
Yet light can’t be both a wave (which is spread out) and a particle (which is
contained in one place).
Or can it?
The answer, from quantum physics, is that
human interaction with light determines what characteristics light will have.
The mere act of studying light changes it. By choosing their experiment, scientists
can see what they want. If an experiment is set up to test wavelike properties,
light will act like a wave; if the experiment is set up to test particle-like
properties, light will act like a particle. Thus, in the quantum realm, “the
observer plays a crucial role in determining the physical nature of what is
being observed.”[iii]
Now, the incredible quantum world of subatomic
particles isn’t the realm of everyday human experience, what’s called the classical
realm, the realm in which we live, move, and have our being, the realm where
reality affects us as much as, if not more, than we affect it. We confront a
reality that’s already there to meet us, not one that exists only because we
view it or that exists in a certain way because we view it a certain way. We’re
scratched by Schrödinger’s cat, not because our interaction with the cat caused
it to exist, but because we stepped on its tail, which was already there before
we mashed it.
On the other hand, recent events in the Christian
world could almost lead one to think that Protestants are acting as if the statistical
uncertainty of quantum physics does govern reality. For many Protestants, the
Roman Catholic Church has become like entities in the quantum realm; these Protestants
see what they want depending on how they view it.
Since the sixteenth century, when Protestants
have looked at the Roman Catholic Church, they have seen one thing, the same
thing—the antichrist, the harlot of Revelation 17, Babylon the great, the beast
of Revelation 13, and the persecuting little horn of Daniel 7 and 8. Viewing
Rome through the lens of Scripture, Protestants all but unanimously viewed the
papal system as the explicit manifestation of Paul’s warning in Thessalonians:
“Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there
come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped;
so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God”
(2 Thessalonians 2:1-3). Protestantism was partially founded on the premise
that the Roman Papacy was the antichrist, a view firmly rooted in the biblical
texts and one held by Protestants for hundreds of years.
“The prophecies concerning the Antichrist,”
wrote church historian Leroy Edwin Froom, “soon became the center of controversy,
as the [Protestant] Reformers pointed the incriminating finger of prophecy,
saying, Thou art the Man of Sin! Rome was declared to be the Babylon of the
Apocalypse, and the papal pontiffs, in their succession, the predicted Man of
Sin. Separation from the Church of Rome and its pontifical head therefore came
to be regarded as a sacred, bounden duty. Christians were urged to obey the
command, ‘Come out of her, My people.’ To them, this separation was separation
not from Christ and His church but from Antichrist. This was the basic principle
upon which the Reformers prosecuted their work from the beginning.”[iv]
Even a cursory look at Martin Luther’s writings,
such as the one titled, Against the Roman Papacy As An Institution of the
Devil, proves how basic this belief was.[v] For Luther, according to historians Iserloh,
Glazik, and Jedin, “the papal church is the demoniacal power described in Scripture
as antichrist, which lasts to the end of days and is to be fought, not with
weapons, but with the word and the Spirit.” [vi] Most other of the early Reformers, while agreeing
on little else, agreed on this point regarding the identity of Rome.
For centuries after Luther, Protestants of
all stripes, whatever their doctrinal differences, saw in Rome the antichrist
power depicted—and blatantly condemned—in Scripture. Almost all nascent Protestant
movements (usually formed by breaking away from other ones), when looking at
Rome, its teaching, its official statements, and its practices and decrees,
came to the same conclusion. Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Puritans,
Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Congregationalists, you name it, all saw Rome as
antichrist. Anti-Catholicism was so basic and fundamental that it often formed
part of the Protestant creeds. For instance, the Second Scotch Confession of
Faith (A.D. 1580) reads in part:
“And theirfoir we abhorre and detest all contrare Religion and Doctrine; but
chiefly all kynde of Papistrie in generall and particular head is, even as they
are now damned and confronted by the word of God and Scotland. But in special,
we detest and refuse the usurped authorities of the Romane Antichrist upon the
Scriptures of God. . . .” [vii] This belief regarding the “Romane
Antichrist” was as fundamental to Protestantism as was justification by faith
alone, and remained so well into the twentieth century.
But times have changed, even dramatically.
Rome is no longer the antichrist, or even an apostate church that has perverted
or lost the essential truths of salvation by faith alone. On the contrary, when
many Protestants look at Roman Catholics, they see those with a “common understanding
of salvation,” who are “brothers and sisters in Christ.” They see a “common
faith” held by those with whom Protestants can “together bear witness to the
gift of salvation.” They see those who are “disciples together of the Lord Jesus
Christ,” those with whom they have “unity in the gospel.” Some even now view
the pope, whose mere existence was once an affront to biblical Christianity,
as “the universal primate . . . to be received by all churches.” Even in Adventism,
the historical—and biblical—understanding of Papal Rome has been questioned,
which proves just how infectious this new perception has become.
[viii]
Quantum or classic?
What’s happened here? Has Roman Catholicism
become like light, and Protestants like scientists viewing it in the sub-atomic
realm? Are people seeing merely what they want to see? Are Protestants choosing
the means by which they look at Rome in order to “change” it into a reality
that they want?
Rome has, it is true, changed in some dramatic
ways. For example, since Vatican Council II the papacy has been bridging the
gap between itself and other denominations, a radical shift from her previous
antipathy to all those who were outside the “Mother Church.” This is the age
of pluralism, of nonjudgmentalism, of ecumenism, and tolerance and religious
freedom, and Rome certainly is imbibing of this zeitgeist. Instead of
openly attacking and denouncing Protestants and Protestant theology as (according
to one pope) “the nefarious enterprises of wicked men, who, like raging waves
of the sea foaming out their own confusion, and promising liberty whereas they
are the slaves of corruption, have striven by their deceptive opinions and most
pernicious writings to raze the foundations of the Catholic religion and of
civil society, to remove from among men all virtue and justice, to deprave persons,
and especially inexperienced youth, to lead it into the snares of error, and
at length to tear it from the bosom of the Catholic Church”
[ix] —Rome is actively seeking reunion and unity with these once “nefarious”
“slaves of corruption.” In contrast to previous vicars, Pope John Paul II issued
in 1995 an encyclical called Ut Unum Sint (“That They May Be One”), in
which he passionately appealed for unity among all churches, saying that he
longed for a day when “there may be one visible Church of God.” [x]
Also, unlike his predecessors, John Paul
II has published some of the clearest and most ringing statements about religious
freedom ever published by anyone anywhere, claiming that “it is essential that
the right to express one’s own religious convictions publicly and in all domains
of civil life be ensured” and that “people must not attempt to impose their
own ‘truth’ on others” [xi] —a big shift from the time when popes railed
against liberty of conscience and religious freedom. In these areas, Rome has
indeed made some radical, and undeniable, changes.
What Rome hasn’t changed its position on,
however, is the issue that started the Reformation itself—justification by faith
alone, what the Reformers called “the article upon which the church stands or
falls,” “the first and chief article” [xii] of faith, the “ruler and judge over all
other Christian doctrines”—the exact issue that many Protestants are now claiming
as the basis for unity with Rome!
It’s amazing. However much Protestants are
acting as if everyday reality functions at the quantum realm—the realm in which
just viewing an object changes its characteristics—instead, what’s happening
is pure classical physics: it isn’t the object that is changed by being
observed, it’s the subject. It’s not what is being viewed that is altered,
but the viewer himself. Protestants haven’t opened the box and, by looking,
created a live cat with sharp claws; instead, they have been unwittingly scratched,
deeply, by claws that were already there to begin with.
Antichrist as the “body of Christ”
All one has to do is read, carefully, what
Rome teaches her own people, and what practices she still espouses, in order
to see that today she no more proclaims righteousness by faith, as taught by
Paul and Luther, than she did in the sixteenth century when the Council of Trent
formally rejected justification by faith alone and condemned the Reformation.
Roman Catholic theology and dogma prove that Rome could never accept the gospel,
as historically understood by Protestants, without radically reshuffling, revising,
or undoing her most basic doctrines, which she has not done.
Nor does she need to. All Rome needs to do
is sign a few documents with phraseology nebulous enough for each side to read
into the texts what they want to read, and Protestants can proclaim unity with
the same system that for centuries it labeled “antichrist.” Antichrist has now
become part of the body of Christ—without having to change a single essential
doctrine. Rome is following one of the early thorns in her flesh, William of
Occam whose famous principle stated, Why make things more complicated than
they need be? Why should Rome change any essentials when she doesn’t have
to? It’s Protestants who are changing.
“Has Rome’s position changed?” asked evangelical
writer Michael Horton in the context of this new Protestant rush to claim unity
with Rome. “In fact it has not. The Vatican II documents as well as the New
Catechism of the Catholic Church reinvoke the theological position of the
Council of Trent, condemning the gospel of justification by an imputed righteousness.
If it is not Rome that has altered its position in favor of the gospel, then
it must be the other partner that has moved from its earlier position.” [xiii]
Horton sounds like Ellen White, who wrote:
“It is not without reason that the claim has been put forth that Catholicism
is now almost like Protestantism. There has been a change; but the change is
in Protestants, not in Romanists.” [xiv] She wrote these words more than a century
before Protestants and Catholics were signing statements such as Evangelical
and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium, in
which evangelicals claimed that because Roman Catholics have the gospel, there
was no need for Protestants to evangelize them.
What’s happening here? Conservative Protestants,
once Rome’s most implacable foe, now claim unity with the papacy, not just over
such issues as abortion, prayer in school, or pornography, but over justification
by faith, the very issue that has divided them for centuries! Evangelical leaders
in America write articles and books claiming that Roman Catholics and Protestants
have the same understanding of salvation and justification by faith! Justification
by faith alone, which once divided the two groups now suddenly unites them!
Twice in the 1990s conservative Protestants
in the United States have signed documents claiming that Roman Catholics and
Protestants agree on the essential elements of the gospel, of salvation by faith
alone. And, astonishingly, in 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and Roman Catholics
signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in Augsburg,
Germany, claiming “a consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification,”
which “shows that the remaining differences in its explication are no longer
the occasion for doctrinal condemnations” [xv] and therefore “the reasons for the rift in the sixteenth century is
no longer applicable for the present moment.” [xvi]
How can this be? Why are Protestants so eager
to claim that Rome has a biblical understanding of salvation by faith alone,
when it’s obvious that Rome’s doctrine of salvation is still anti-Christian
in every form? When Catholics say that we are “saved by faith in Christ,” or
that we are “saved by grace alone,” or that we are “justified by Christ alone”
or that “Christ’s righteousness alone give us merit before God” do they mean
the same thing that Protestants mean when they make the same statements? Or,
instead, are Catholics using similar language to express radically different
concepts, while Protestants—acting as if everyday reality mirrors the way things
work in the quantum realm—are seeing in Rome what they want to see by selectively
choosing just how they look at it?
The answer will be obvious.
Cat in the box
Schrödinger’s cat left many questions unanswered
in the quantum realm. (By the way, Schrödinger never actually did stick some
hapless feline in a box filled with cyanide; it was just a “thought experiment”).
Yet that was the whole point, to show problems with the idea that observers
could change reality by viewing it. And one problem is this: At what point does
reality shift from quantum to classical physics? It’s one thing to try to measure
an object only ten billionths of a centimeter in size and weighing a millionth
part of a billion billionth of a gram. Observing or measuring something of that
size could, conceivably, disturb (or even destroy) it. Most of us, however,
don’t deal with things that small, at least not consciously.
Nevertheless, observation and measurement—whatever
they might do to what is observed at the quantum or classical level—always
affects the observer. To look at Jupiter is to have photons of sunlight reflected
off the Jovian atmosphere and surface, reach into the eye, and impinge upon
the retina, which in turn converts light energy into nerve energy that streams
into the brain as an electrical-chemical process that can leave permanent synaptic
connections in the brain. We are indeed changed, to some degree, by what we
perceive, measure, and observe.
The crucial question, then, is: What has
happened to Protestants that, looking at Rome, they see something radically
different than what’s there? Unless Rome exists on the quantum realm, and thus
changes when she is viewed, the change has to be in the observer himself, typical
of classical, not quantum, physics. Something has happened to Protestants, something
that, perhaps, cannot be explained by physics—quantum or classical. Though sociology,
psychology, politics, and anthropology all come into play, the crucial factor,
the one that can answer this question, is found, instead, in theology—particularly
prophecy:
“And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded
to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after
the beast.” (Revelation 13:3, italics supplied).
_________________________
[i] Gribbon, John. In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum
Physics and Reality (New York: Bantam Books) 1984, p. 203.
[ii] Davies, Paul. God & The New Physics (New
York: Touchstone Books) 1983, p. 114.
[iii] Gleiser, Marcelo. The Dancing Universe: From Creation
Myths to the Big Bang (New York: Plume Books) 1997, p. 229.
[iv] Leroy Edwin Froom. The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers
(Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald Publishing Company,) 1984, vol. II, p.
245.
[v] See Luther’s Works. Volume 55. Index. (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press) 1986, p.12.
[vi] Erwin Iserloh, Joseph Glazis, Hubert Jedin. History
of the Christian Church. “Reformation and Counter Reformation,” vol. 5
(New York: Seabury Press) 1980, p 78.
[vii] Schaff, Philip. The Creeds of Christendom, vol.
III. “The Evangelical Protestant Creeds” (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book
House) 1983, p. 481.
[viii] See Reinder Bruinsma, “Adventists and Catholics: Prophetic
Preview or Prejudice?” Spectrum Summer, 1999, pp. 45-52.
[ix] Pope Pius IX, Encyclical Quanta Cura 8, December
1864. Section 1.
[x] Ut Unum Sint (Vatican
City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana) 1995. p. 11.
[xi] Message of His Holiness Pope John Paul II For the
Celebration of the World Day of Peace. 1 January 1991, pp. 3, 4.
[xii] The Smalcald Articles, II, I; Book of Concord, 292.
[xiii] Michael Horton, writing the forward to Faith Alone, R.C. Sproul
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books) 1995, p. 12.
[xiv] The Spirit of Prophecy, vol. 4, p. 388.
[xv] “Joint Declaration On The Doctrine of Justification,”
Section 5.
[xvi] Press Release, “ ‘Passing Joint Declaration’ is a ‘big day’ for Lutherans” No. 8/89, http:/www.lutheranworld.org/news/counce8.html.
_________________________
Clifford Goldstein is the editor of the
Adult Sabbath School Bible Study
Guide.
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