It seems protestants can not mortally sin b/c without such a concept of mortal and venial sins, and their sincere belief in “faith alone”, there cannot be a fulfillment of the prerequisite of “full knowledge”. They would not take pause or have full knowledge that a certain action they are about to do would cause separation from God. So they can never actually commit a mortal sin but only a venial sin at most. This means that unless they research and become aware of the Catholic teaching they simply cannot commit any sin worthy of hell. For them salvation truly is by “faith alone”.
Is this a correct way of seeing this situation?
No, not at all. First of all, many Protestants do have something corresponding to a concept of venial/mortal sin–they just don’t use the term. I was certainly taught growing up (in a Wesleyan Holiness context) that certain sins would separate me from God.
In the second place, when Protestants deny the distinction it’s because they hold that all sins are in principle mortal, not because they think all sins are venial! In practice, Protestants almost inevitably wind up reintroducing some form of the distinction, if only along the lines of “sins a real Christian won’t commit habitually and/or persist in for a long time without repenting of them.” Even Luther, in his sermons on the Sermon on the Mount, approved of the distinction in the context of giving pastoral advice to a person troubled by lust (if you don’t dwell on and assent to the thought, it’s not a mortal sin). In other words, Protestant teaching about “all sins being equal” (besides not being held to by Wesleyans and some other Protestants) is about soteriology, not ethics or pastoral care. The (partial) separation of soteriology from ethics and pastoral care is, in my opinion, one of the huge problems with Protestantism. But Catholics often don’t understand how this works.
And finally, I don’t believe the Catholic Church teaches that a person who doesn’t intellectually believe he or she is committing a mortal sin is incapable of committing one. You can deny your conscience and persuade yourself that what you are doing is OK, but still be culpable. Nazis may have believed on some level that it was “right” to murder Jews–that didn’t make them incapable of sinning mortally in this regard unless they were not culpable for the process by which they came to this horrifically erroneous belief. I’ve read a speech by one of the Nazi leaders that admits that slaughtering Jews and other “inferior” peoples went against one’s feelings of humanity–but he argues that it is necessary in order to remove a “cancer.” Someone who thinks this way probably is sinning mortally by deliberately shoving aside the witness of his conscience in the interests of an erroneous ideology.
But certainly one should be cautious about claiming culpability. In our culture, I can imagine a doctor performing abortions out of a misguided sense of compassion. I’m not saying that such a person wouldn’t be subjectively guilty of mortal sin, but depending on their circumstances, upbringing, etc., I can see how possibly they might not be.
There’s a longstanding principle in Christian ethics that if you are culpable for one act, which leads to you committing a second act in a state where you are no longer morally responsible, then you are culpable for both acts. This is traditionally applied to actions committed when a person is drunk. At least that’s how Augustine reasons in
On Free Will, and I think the Catholic moral tradition has largely followed him on this (I studied this text with a Catholic priest and got that impression from him–I’m open to correction). So when considering someone who honestly thinks that a given sinful act is not really a sin, you have to ask how the person got into that state of malformed conscience. And only God knows that for sure. (C. S. Lewis makes this argument in
The Great Divorce about the heretical bishop–I think it’s a helpful approach to understanding why the Church has historically understood heresy to be a grave sin, where modern people assume that what you believe isn’t possibly a matter of moral responsibility.)
As I said, I don’t think this applies to Protestants and sin as a whole. Even the most antinomian Protestant still believes that adultery and murder and so on are sins–he or she just thinks that such sins won’t affect a believer’s relationship with God.
But it might apply to specific things, like the use of birth control
Edwin
“For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.” (