Quora Answer: Can a Catholic Date a Christian?

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ 

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “I am a Catholic teen girl.  My boyfriend is Christian, and his mother says he cannot date me unless I am Christian.  What do I do?” 

If you are Catholic, then you are Christian.  And as for these people who are “Christians”, they are simply Protestants, Christian groups that arose during the Reformation, 1,500 years after the Catholics and the Orthodox Churches.  This begs the obvious question: what makes people who follow beliefs that arose 1,500 years after the Church of Rome think they are closer to the original teachings? 

I was never impressed with Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, or John Knox.  I found the so-called democratisation of Scripture to be an exercise in anti-intellectualism, and a dilution of the academic traditions of Christian theology, particularly theodicy and Christology.  We have lay people, with no grounding in the languages of Scripture, reading translations or translations, an coming up with ridiculous notions to justify their prejudices and bias.  Their excuse is their absolute ignorance of Christian intellectual tradition. 

The Catholic and Orthodox traditions can proudly mention Bishop Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, Fr. Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, Origen Adamantius, and a hundred other intellectual giants among the Church Fathers.  What can the Protestants lay claim to?  Martin Luther, that racist, anti-Semite, who called for the eradication of the Jews as “Christ-killers”.  He suffered from constipation, and literally wrote his theological positions while sitting on the toilet. He could have used his thesis for toilet paper, and the world would have been a better place.  And then we have John Calvin, the Wahhabi of the Christians, who banned music, who proscribed anything that brought joy, and invented a doctrine of the elect that denied people the capacity of Salvation, except by the lottery of Divine Choice. 

For these Protestants, with their inadequate, literalist interpretation of Scripture to then claim that Catholics are not Christians is the height of idiocy and ignorance.  It is like the bastard child that ran away from home, instead of working on the farm, to then come back to claim they should reap the harvest.