Free The Protestant's Dilemma by Devin Rose

[Jesus] sins; no one who sins has seen him or known him” (1 John 3:6).
    An apparent contradiction exists here. From the first passage, it is clear that if we claim we don’t sin, we are liars, because we do sin. But the second passage seems to say that if we remain in Jesus, we do not sin. What gives? Since most Protestants (along with Catholics) believe the Bible to be inerrant, this contradiction must be only an apparent one. How, then, can these two verses be reconciled?
    Many Protestants who read this passage decide that in the second passage John must mean “persists in sinning” or “sins and doesn’t repent.” Otherwise, it would mean that if we commit a sin, which most of us do fairly often, we do not know Jesus—which sounds pretty harsh. Yet if we apply this interpretation to resolve the seeming contradiction, we are mentally interjecting new words into God’s Word.
    Let us consider another passage in 1 John: “As for you, the anointing that you received from him remains in you, so that you do not need anyone to teach you. But his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and not false” (1 John 2:27).
    The simplest interpretation of this passage would be that we Christians do not need anyone to teach us, because we received the anointing from the Holy Spirit, who will teach us all we need to know. A logical deduction from this passage, combined with the ones 39 that tell us we are all priests, is that we do not need a ministerial priesthood and perhaps no type of pastor at all.
    Some Quaker communities do indeed point to this passage as proof that we don’t need any human authorities or teachers, claiming that the Holy Spirit teaches us directly. Quakers meet in services with no leader whatsoever, and only when one of the members is “moved by the Spirit” does he get up and speak a word to the others. Most Protestants do not go to that extreme and are willing to accept human authorities, at least so long as they are properly elected or display an agreeable level of spiritual knowledge. But they will still use this passage to claim for themselves a sort of “sanctified intuition,” 40 whereby their own thoughts or ideas are all of the Holy Spirit and even superior to their leaders’. Either way, the idea that we don’t need anyone to teach us seems confusing, since other passages 41 in the New Testament commend us to learn from wiser elders.
    When confronted with such a difficult passage, Protestants often recommend that we “use Scripture to interpret Scripture,” promising that unclear or seemingly contradictory verses will be made clear or resolved by looking to other verses. This is a sensible suggestion, and indeed there are times when one passage clearly shines light on another. Perhaps this is the key to interpreting difficult biblical passages?
     
    BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,
    The Bible was not intended to be studied in isolation from the Apostolic Tradition and apart from the teaching authority of Christ’s Church.
     
    We just looked at a few passages that seem contradictory or unclear. (Many more could be produced easily, passages that have led to differences within Protestantism on baptism, the Eucharist, women’s ordination, church structure and governance, justification, and even the Trinity.) We looked at ways that some Protestants try to resolve them. How do Catholics do it?
    Regarding the first two verses, on whether Christians continue to sin or not, Catholics draw a distinction between two degrees of sin: mortal and venial. 42 Mortal sin is so grave that the Christian loses the divine life of God in his soul and thus falls from a state of sanctifying grace, putting him in peril of eternal damnation. Venial sin is of a lesser degree and does not cause the Christian to lose sanctifying grace. With this distinction, it is possible to understand John’s words as meaning that no Christian who remains in Jesus continues to sin mortally , because to do so is to reject