13. The Evangelical Moment?
Where have evangelicals and Catholics come in relationship with each other? How did they are at this point, and what effect has Vatican II had on Catholicism? What has changed? How should evangelicals understand post-Vatican II Catholicism? The present changes offer some new opportunities for dialogue that should be entered into cautiously, for Rome is really no closer to the major concerns of the Reformation than she was five centuries ago. Indeed, she is much further away when we consider the effects of modernity and liberal theology.
Millions of Catholics and Protestants are in need of the grace of God revealed only in the gospel. Evangelicals, who may very well be at a great moment in their history, have lost knowledge of, and confidence in, the gospel. The answers are not to be found in a new revivalism, which, in fact, is more Roman Catholic than genuinely evangelical. What is needed is a widespread doctrinal reformation coupled with the power of the Word and Spirit in preaching.
ESSAY 13
THE EVANGELICAL MOMENT?
John H. Armstrong
Much has changed on the religious scene in recent decades. Certain individual Roman Catholics increasingly sound more and more like evangelicals, while certain evangelicals sound more and more like Roman Catholics. Older stereotypes don’t seem to fit any more.
As we have already seen, especially in Part 3, there is a growing common ground being found between Protestant evangelicals and Roman Catholics, especially in the public arena of moral and ethical concerns. This alone has caused scores of priests and evangelical ministers, along with committed church members from both traditions, to “find one another.” The publication of “Evangelicals & Catholics Together The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium” (April 1994) is the most obvious example of a growing evangelical desire to work more closely with Roman Catholics. The response to all of this ranges from excitement over our common faith and message to open skepticism that any good thing can come from this relationship. Evangelical excitement, for example, can be observed in the highly respected writings of Charles Colson: “When Catholic priests and Protestant lay people stand together peacefully praying, in front of abortion clinics, it is a powerful witness. Many have been arrested, but I doubt that they’ve sat around in those bleak jail cells debating the Council of Trent.”1
Critical reaction to Colson and to contemporary Catholic-evangelical discussion in general, ranges from gasps of horror and passionate outrage to careful and helpful criticism. Texe Marrs, author of numerous popular titles, asks Chuck Colson, “Will You Sell Your Soul to the Devil for a Million Dollars?” (because of the gift of a million dollars to Prison Fellowship associated with his accepting the John S. Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion). 2From a different theological front, John Robbins writes: “The issue is the counterfeit gospel Colson teaches while on Earth, which is misleading many souls besides his own. Colson—and anyone else—will make it to heaven only if he believes the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is not the gospel Colson preaches.”3
In the book, Evangelical Catholics, Charles Colson writes in the foreword: “It’s high time that all of us who are Christians come together regardless of the difference of our confessions and our traditions and make common cause to bring Christian values to bear in our society. When the barbarians are scaling the walls, there is no time for petty quarreling in the camp.”4
Statements like these add fuel to a growing controversy. It is only fair to observe that Colson, for all the attack that has been leveled against him, does not specifically urge the overt surrender of evangelical doctrine. His words, taken in their plain sense, do not directly touch important categories of Protestant belief. He seems quite plainly to be speaking of a common cause that we can share in the “public square,” as Richard J. Neuhaus has referred to it. But a growing concern has been felt by many evangelicals when they read these kinds of statements. They seem unwise. They seem to say, since (certain) doctrines divide us, let’s find our cause together wherever possible and leave off the thorny issues that have separated us for more than four centuries. When several notable evangelical ministers and authors have gone over to Roman Catholicism in recent years (as we saw in Kim Riddlebarger’s essay in chapter 10), is it any wonder that thoughtful evangelical readers are concerned? Paul G. Schrotenboer, writing an introduction to published papers on Roman Catholicism prepared by the Theological Commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship, sums up this instinctive and proper concern by saying,
There is much to give [evangelicals] hope for reformation according to the Word of God in the Church of Rome. There is also much in the recent reaffirmations of Roman Catholicism to give us pause in believing that all basic differences will soon have been removed.
The challenge is to bear witness to the faith once for all entrusted to the people of God (Jude 3) and to be honest and open in recognizing both agreements and departures from this faith.3
The landscape is definitely changing. But is this change something we should applaud without significant reservation? I think not. When Colson refers to the differences between evangelicals and Roman Catholics as “petty quarreling in the camp,” I think we need to ask some serious questions that might be hard to address clearly in the present atmosphere. Though many evangelicals seem genuinely delighted to put aside the old attitudes and Catholic bashing of an earlier century, are we not in danger of denying the very doctrinal concerns that have seriously divided us for 450 years? R. C. Sproul sums up my concern well when he places himself in the category of “a small minority of Protestants who take very seriously those lines of demarcation.” Sproul expresses the fear that this overall change in attitude reflects doctrinal apathy more than genuine theological unity when he adds, “One of the reasons we don’t fight about truth anymore is that we don’t care about truth as much.”6
These differing responses of evangelicals to Roman Catholicism could be seen in August 1993 when Pope John Paul II addressed Catholic young people at World Youth Day (1993) in Denver, Colorado. Concern was evident among many Catholic leaders that because so many young people were being lost to the Roman Catholic Church, and many of them particularly to evangelical churches, something needed to be done to address these and other concerns. Several aggressively evangelistic ministries sought to challenge Roman Catholic youth to turn to Christ and leave their church, while other high-profile evangelical leaders expressed publicly their sympathy with the event. The International Bible Society provided a commemorative leaflet, based on the gospel of John, with funding for this coming from several sources, including the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs. Prominent musicians, generally associated with evangelicals and their ministries, performed at Youth Day concerts.7
This new kind of cooperation has grown remarkably in recent years. Truly old hostilities are dying. Much in this can be praised, but many of the old questions still remain relevant for those of us who are committed to the centrality and sole authority of Scripture as well as to the priority of grace alone received through faith alone. With R. C. Sproul I am concerned that the real problem for both Roman Catholics and evangelicals, as several essays in this volume have sought to demonstrate, is that we don’t care very deeply about the truth any more. Evangelicals must be willing to dialogue regarding twentieth-century issues and concerns, but one begins to wonder if we are willing to give away the farm in the process.
HOW DID WE ARRIVE AT THIS MOMENT?
As has been shown by Robert Strimple (chapter 4), we didn’t come to this moment in our history overnight. Vatican Council II was convened on October 11, 1962, by Pope John XXIII (who died in June 1963). It was this pontiff who desired to “open the windows and let in some fresh air.” The council was concluded with a fourth major session on December 8, 1965. Pope Paul VI presided over the last three sessions, leading the council in the production of sixteen major documents that now fill two large volumes.
Roman Catholicism has always had divisions within its ranks, but one thing was always quite clear—if you were a Roman Catholic you knew what your priest, your bishop, and your church really believed. Catholicism looked much the same in almost every place it took root, and Catholics, with few exceptions, generally believed and practiced the same faith, at least publicly. Since Vatican II, all that has changed. Michael Howard, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, has aptly referred to this Vatican Council as the “second great revolution” of our century. (The first was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which makes me wonder if we have seen a third great revolution in the recent overthrow of communist governments in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe.) Why? George A^feigel, a Roman Catholic, has answered, “[because of] the transformation of the world’s oldest continuous institution from an instrument of the status quo into an instrument of change.” >\feigel asserts, furthermore, that “Vatican II was not a serendipitous upheaval; a generation of Catholic philosophical, theological, biblical, and liturgical scholarship paved the way.”8 What kind of revolution did Vatican II cause? Weigel suggests there were five aspects to it, or, to be even more precise, “five revolutions in Rome.”
The first is modernity. A break came from “Apologetic Catholicism,” by which ^feigel means that the church opened itself up to the fruit of modern scholarship and began to abandon neoscholastic forms of expression, which it had treated as virtually immutable for centuries. It changed, almost overnight, from its centuries-old defensive posture toward new insights. John ΧΧΙII spoke of “prophets of gloom . . . (who) behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, nonetheless, the teacher of life.” And as Weigel notes, the pope urged the view that “authentic doctrine should be studied and expounded through the methods of research and through the literary forms of modern thought. . . [for] the substance of the . . . deposit of faith is (Hie thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.”9
It is important for evangelicals to understand this change. Building (hi the thinking of theologians like Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and John Courtney Murray, Vatican II officially opened the doors for a new way of thinking about the world, about history, and about the Christian faith in particular. Sometimes Protestants are prone to argue that since Rome cannot and does not change—semper idem (“always the same”)—nothing was really changed by Vatican II. This kind of argument was advanced by Lorraine Boettner in 1965:
The Roman Church has now been frozen into a definite pattern from which she cannot change and which is basically the same today as it was in the days of the Inquisition. What sometimes looks like a change is merely a policy of caution which she has been forced to adopt because of public opinion. She changes her methods, but not her spirit.10
David Wells, an evangelical scholar who has given considerable attention to the actual documents of Vatican II, wrote more than twenty years ago, “the truth is, Boettner notwithstanding, that both the spirit and the doctrine of Catholicism are changing” (italics added).11 Wells properly concludes: “the myth of an unchanging Catholicism has now been exploded.”12 Weigel notes that the second revolution sparked by Vatican II was selfunderstanding. By this he means that the church, with its hierarchical concept of leadership that can be viewed much like a pyramid, took a new approach to the laity. To be a “lay” Catholic was now a “calling,” not simply the absence of a “religious vocation.”13 This ongoing revolution in Rome can be seen in numerous lay organizations for chinch and personal renewal that spring up regularly.
The third revolution was liturgical. This is the change most Protestants have seen if they have been awake during the last thirty years. It is often said by well meaning evangelicals that the only thing changed by Vatican II was that the Latin Mass can now be heard in English and meat can be eaten on Fridays! Such a response is far too simplistic.14
Fourth, the council radically altered the relationship Roman Catholicism has to other churches, to Judaism, and ultimately to all non-Christian religions. Plunging into the liberal Protestant stream of ecumenism, Rome entered into interfaith dialogue. One must say upon reading the theology that has come out in the ensuing years, that the results have generally led to religious syncretism.13
Finally, and this was no small concession of change for Rome, Vatican II
taught that religious liberty was the most fundamental human right: a revolutionary “extension” for a Church that had long seen altar-and-throne arrangements, like those in pre-reformation England and, later in Franco’s Spain, as the desirable norm. TTie Declaration on Religious Freedom was the particular gift of the American Church to Vatican II: its principal author was John Courtney Murray, and the Declaration reflected the distinctive experience of American Catholicism in a natively pluralistic religious environment.16
The Protestant Reformers did not begin their protest with the intention of dividing the church of their time. Their clear intention was to call the church back to her historic foundations and to the gospel of the New Testament. They challenged Rome’s teaching authority on the basis of the gospel. They were patristic scholars, using the Fathers of the church to establish most of what they argued. Their burden was to show that what they believed was established in Scripture and confirmed in historical faith and practice. They did not argue, as do modern restorationists, that after the close of the Canon the church had been almost immediately lost. Rome’s response, twenty-five years after the challenge had begun, was to convene a council in the northern Italian city of Trent (1545). On three different occasions this council met, finishing its work in 1563. The decrees of this council became the definitive and authoritative answers of the Roman Catholic Church against the
teachings of the Protestant Reformers. The meaning of grace, the Scripture’s authority, the sacraments, and the role of the papacy were all determined with a kind of harsh finality! Anathemas were pronounced upon all the distinctive evangelical doctrinal elements taught by the Reformers.
A good summation of the effect of Trent on Roman Catholic faith and life is provided by Robert A. Burns, a Roman Catholic professor of religion at the University of Arizona:
The Council of Trent was held to present the authoritative answers of the Catholic Church to the objections of the Protestant reformers. In order to promote Catholic unity, clear definitions were given concerning Catholic dogma. For example, a definition of the ChurcII’s role emerged that stressed its visible institutional structures and identified the Church with the kingdom of God cm earth. Because of the narrowness of this definition, Catholicism tended to become ex-clusivistic in its thinking and static in its world view. The Council of Trent also issued a number of regulations to promote unity. . . . The liturgy of the Mass was standardized and the Index of Forbidden Books was issued. These edicts helped maintain Catholic uniformity for the four hundred years after Trent. Great stress was placed on Church authority to maintain this post-Tridentine Catholic oneness.17
All of this led to what Burns and other modern Catholic academicians freely refer to as a “fortress” mentality. Two significant movements affected the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The Enlightenment undermined belief in the supernatural in general and the Bible in particular. Human reason was deified. The French Revolution (1789-99) introduced these ideas into the realm of political thought and brought about the downfall of the old order in Europe. Christianity was bitterly attacked in France, and the effects extended far beyond. Burns is helpful once again when he writes, “In order to understand why the Catholic Church reacted so negatively to the French Revolution and the idea of political democracy, one need only recall that the Church favored monarchy as the ideal and advocated the notion that Catholicism should be the official religion of every nation.”18
There arose in France two distinctly different movements that would affect Roman Catholic thought into the twentieth century, and the divisions would only be settled officially at Vatican II. One movement reasserted the authority of the church, and in particular the papacy, as a bulwark against encroaching rationalism and post-Kantian thought. This conservative movement has been called ultramontanism (which meant literally “beyond the Alps”). This name was given because the papacy was located across the Alps in Italy. The other movement, which was obviously more liberal, sought to incorporate the newer ideas of freedom in thought and the separation of church and state.19
It was out of this post-Enlightenment thinking, mixed into a century-plus of papal authority virtually unchecked by other forces in the church, that Rome entered the twentieth century. By the time Vatican II was convened it was inevitable that the forces that had been at work for some time to bring Roman Catholic thought and practice into line with modern worldviews were going to win the day.
It is here that most evangelicals are confused about modern Catholic theology and practice. The new Catholic position—and again we must realize that it is new—reinterprets the old concepts, dogmas, and life in terms of the new. Wells wisely expresses the essence of my argument:
On the level of cognition—what man can know—the old Catholic was confident and affirmative. The new Catholic by contrast, tends to be agnostic in some respects and uncertain in others. He is the child of the existential, not the classical, world. For him, the object of religious knowledge, in this case Christ, is often obscure. The sharp lines of distinction in matters of truth are not untenable, perhaps even desirable. The concern has shifted from objective definition to subjective experience. It is not what you believe which is important but that you believe, not what you believe in but the quality of your commitment as you believe.20
All doctrinal formulations, in this way of thinking, are subject to revision, precisely because truth, which may be perspicuous to God, is blurred and unclear to us. As Protestant Wells notes, the close relationship between Christ and the church, which had always been a part of Roman Catholic reality, was now broken. Amazingly, it was Pope John XXIII who helped break this relationship when he said at the initial session of Vatican II, “the substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.” This statement means more than saying that truth is objective and final; we must learn to put it in new words and forms for differing cultures. Wells says that John XXIII’s “single sentence was a pithy, if deceptively simple, summary of the new ideas: There is a distinction to be drawn between truth in itself (‘the deposit of faith is one thing’) and truth as it is comprehended by the Church and taught to the world (‘the way in which it is presented is another’).”21
Radical theologians like Hans Kung, Leonardo Boff, and Charles Curran, who were eventually marginalized by the Catholic hierarchy, simply developed this kind of thinking, whether or not the church was ready for it. Theology has a wax nose with this approach. What kind of Catholicism do you want? You are working with “the deposit of faith” just like the other person, but what you see in it can be different; indeed it probably will be.
That is precisely why the present pope, John Paul II, can appear to be so very traditional in certain areas and at the same time embrace non-Christian religions and speak of salvation for non-Christians. This confuses evangelicals and not a few traditional Catholics who don’t understand what has happened. When the Constitution on the Church says, “at all times and among every people, God has given welcome to whosoever fears Him and does what is right,”22 then I can only conclude that B. C. Butler has understood Roman Catholic thought correctly when he writes, “Salvation is, for the individual, radically dependent on subjective good intention [rather] than on external ecclesiastical allegiance.”23
For centuries the magisterium had insisted that there was no salvation outside the church ( extra ecclesiam nulla salus ), which meant, of course, the Roman Catholic Church. This sometimes caused a decidedly uncharitable response to Protestant evangelicals, who were considered lost outside of Rome and her sacramental system. What changed? Did Rome officially retract the old doctrines of the Council of Trent, admitting that they had been in error in teaching them previously? Of course not. What Rome did was add a new formula, or a new way of thinking about these matters. Doctrines could now be taken up in an unrelated manner, just as had been done for decades in liberal Protestant schools and churches. This has effectively caused a completely new understanding of the old confessions of faith in much of Protestantism, changing the meaning of received truth entirely. It is doing the same in modern Catholicism. The result is an understanding of man and salvation that pictures God’s salvific activity to be like concentric circles. Christ is at the center, with the closest circle being the Roman Catholic Church. The next circle, farther from the center, but still in relationship with it, consists of non-Catholic Christians, or “separated brethren.” The next circle would include the non-Christian religions. Even here there is relationship to Christ and to His church; that is, you can begin to talk about a Hindu who is really in fellowship with the Roman Catholic Church, and thus with Christ, even though he doesn’t realize it. (This has, of course, redefined the missionary calling of the church so that Rome often does not seek to bring members of non-Christian religions into her communion as she did in previous centuries.) 'Wells helps us see the thinking behind this missiology more clearly:
The Council was not saying that all religions are equally true. Rather, it was trying to combine the old idea that Christ is to be found only in the Roman Catholic Church with the newer idea that something of the divine can be seen in all men. . . . The outstanding problem which has been posed, but hardly answered, by the new concept is how much of a Christward orientation is needed to establish membership in the People of God. Some theologians, building on the Council’s teaching, have argued that one day the People of God will become coextensive with the human race. Are all, then, members of God’s kingdom even now?24
But what about atheists and infidels? Well, even atheists are not without hope in the theology of prominent Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, who calls them, amazingly, “anonymous Christians.”25
Roman Catholics and evangelicals cannot afford to ignore each other. In a world like the one we live in, building walls of strict isolation will be increasingly impossible for all Christian traditions. An Index of Forbidden Books will no longer serve to keep the faithful in line, whether issued by Rome or by a fundamentalist school or fellowship determined to keep their youth in the faith. Davis Duggins, senior editor of Moody magazine, perceptively sums up our present situation: “Changes in society and in the Catholic Church are forcing evangelicals to reexamine their relationships with Catholics. While the previous generation of evangelicals and Catholics generally avoided any contact, such isolation has become much less feasible. Today the questions concern what kind of cooperation and how much is appropriate?”26
Protestant and Catholic theology have been converging in our time but, as John W. Montgomery has aptly noted, “not at a recognizable, articulated, and firmly established juncture, but in a mystic cloud of unknowing.”27 This “cloud of unknowing” seems to surround many of the recent attempts at agreement addressed in this volume.
As we have seen in Part 3, there is room for carefully defined common ground between us. I believe that this type of common ground is likely to increase, precisely because the culture seems hell-bent on turning away from its Western moral foundation that was grounded in the Christian tradition, socially and ethically. In those areas where spiritual communion could bring us together around the central truths of the gospel, I believe we already see evidence that the door is closing and that conservative Catholics increasingly desire to stress again the doctrines of Trent, which can never be accepted by evangelicals who maintain a truth base for fellowship in Christ and the visible church. Wells, writing some fifteen years after his fuller analysis of Vatican II was published, notes:
If Catholicism is to become more Catholic in the future, which is what I expect under the present pope, then theological differences with evangelicals will become sharper but our alliances with Catholics against the secular culture can become deeper. I, for one, am ready for that tradeoff. Evangelicals have far less to gain from dialogue with Rome than they do in using a common Christian arsenal with Catholics to protect life and values in the midst of an exceedingly crooked generation.28
WHERE ARE WE AT THIS ΉΜΕ IN HISTORY?
The type of thinking that has developed since Vatican II, which is representative of serious Catholic theologizing in the last decade of the twentieth century, tends to cast a different light upon where we are today and how we got there. If evangelicals are to be wise, and remain faithful to the gospel, they must be extremely careful in navigating these presently uncharted waters.
Whereas certain evangelicals are attacking popular spokespersons such as Charles Colson, with some basis due to his lack of theological clarity in areas where caution and clearer thinking might have served his cause better, others are almost unquestkmingly following Colson, along with several other popular evangelical writers. More than thirty years of cooperative non-theolog-ically based mass evangelism has prepared a generation for a new way. Many are thinking, We agree on so much, why not work together and forget our old hostilities? They may have a friend who displays love for Christ and the Scriptures who has remained in the Roman Catholic Church. Their neighbor seems to be genuinely evangelical in every way and just as concerned for biblical Christianity as they are, if not more so. Their Bible study group might include Roman Catholics who have come, through their study of the Word, to openly confess their love for Christ. They have displayed open excitement about knowing the Scriptures. Or perhaps they have served on the community evangelistic planning team and worked alongside a Catholic, seeing their evident zeal for reaching others with the gospel. They use our tracts and methods in witnessing, respect our best-known evangelist and spokesman, Billy Graham, as much as we do, and they now even sing our songs. Who can forget, if they were in attendance or watching on television, seeing Pope John Paul II joining the throngs who sang “Amazing Grace” in Chicago’s Grant Park during a huge outdoor celebration of the Mass? I recall the enthusiastic comments of some evangelicals: “He is one of us, a true evangelical. Did you see him? Did you hear him quote from the Bible?”
It serves no good purpose to question the pope as a person or to offer judgment about his ultimate standing before God. He is a fallen man and therefore must stand before God as any other mortal in need of divine grace and reconciliation through Christ. Even his own doctrine does not attribute infallibility to him, except when he speaks ex cathedra (“from the chair”), which has been done only a few times in the past several centuries. It serves no real purpose to argue with other evangelicals about what we should call Roman Catholicism. (A debate swirls around this constantly, with some insisting that we must label Roman Catholicism a “cult” in order to be faithful to the teaching of the Bible.) My purpose, rather, is to question the growing response by evangelicals that no longer shows discerning love for the truth and clear understanding of the essential issues of the gospel of Christ. My purpose is to address the questions of life and death, the ultimate issues that must be addressed by all to take seriously the historic Christ and His message.
What this comes back to is truth. What is truth? Where is it to be found? Must truth be embraced by faith for one to know Christ savingly? Is it vitally important to know what is our ultimate source of truth? (In the present concern, as we have seen already, we might even begin by asking, “Can we even know the truth at all, and is there any objective source of truth to be found?”)
We must begin by realizing that Roman Catholicism is much more than another evangelical church with a few minor doctrines added to the gospel. This kind of approach is both naive and reductionistic in the extreme. Because the Spirit of God is breaking through obstacles of spiritual blindness and regenerating individuals by granting them the gifts of faith and repentance does not mean that the Roman Catholic Church is undergoing a powerful new awakening in our day, much less a biblical reformation process. We must become more realistic about the gains that have been experienced since Vatican II. Contrary to the sometimes cheerful evangelical evaluation of a biblical Roman Catholic movement, the opposite is in fact taking place. Harold O. J. Brown, author of chapter 7, has written elsewhere,
Many points of Catholicism contain sound biblical teaching. But the system is so overlaid and interwoven with non-biblical and even unbitdical ideas and practices that it seems to resemble what Paul called “a different gospel” (Gal. 1:6). When Catholics are saved, it is because they have received the grace to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Sometimes it seems to be as much despite the church as thanks to it.29
There are, in reality, two Catholicisms at work in the present church. One is progressive, deeply influenced by Vatican II and what we have seen already (in chapter 4). The other is traditional, very desirous of defending the papacy and the old doctrines peculiar to Catholicism, particularly since the few centuries prior to and after the Protestant Reformation (chapters 2 and 3). Vatican II progressive thinking, reflected almost universally in the prolific writing of theologians of this century and in the universities of American Catholicism, sees authority arising from the church itself, that is, from the laity as the people of God. The other, the more traditional Catholicism developed over centuries of reacting against the gospel message of the Reformers and the divisions of the sixteenth century, sees authority as descending from the papacy and magisterium down to the people. In the progressive view, salvation, as I have shown, is broad, inclusive, and grounded in intentions and subjective response to divine light available to all, even those without the church.
The older view still maintains that salvation is grounded in the sacraments and visible relationship to the Catholic Church. The progressive view is at work in the church quite widely, but the present pope, on the whole, is turning it back in several areas as he asserts the more traditional position in crucial moral and theological areas. Examples of this direction can be seen in the papacy’s response to liberation theology and modern sexual and reproductive concerns. This conservative response can also be seen in the attention given in recent years to the place of Mary, the saints, and the magisterium. Catholic spirituality and preoccupation with mysticism as the means of living the Christian life are undergoing a virtual revival in many quarters. Witness the writings of Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen who have had a great fascination for some evangelicals at the mystical end of the Protestant spectrum. This does not encourage me to believe that the more biblically correct approach of Spirit and Word (chapter 5) is central to these movements of piety presently at work in many Protestant and Roman Catholic communities. Some of the excitement over new spiritual life sounds more like New Age thinking covered with old Catholic dress. Evangelicalism has a “weak underbelly” here and may suffer extensive damage in this dialogue if it continues to drift doctrinally. The mood of Astern culture is much more likely to climb on this wagon than on one that calls believers to the written Word and the Spirit’s great work through preaching and teaching.
As we saw in chapter 12, many Catholics have never heard, much less understood, the gospel of grace. Catholic apologists such as Scott Hahn, Karl Keating, and others aside, the experience of almost every well-taught evangelical Christian is that it is a rarity to meet a faithful Roman Catholic who can articulate plainly the essential doctrines of the gospel, doctrines that are openly and aggressively opposed by the new conservative Catholics like Hahn, Matatics, and Keating. Some Catholics give evidence of “trusting Christ alone" for right standing with God, but most, it must sadly be observed, still equate being a baptized Roman Catholic with being rightly related to Jesus Christ. It should be added that multitudes of Protestants have this same sandy basis of hope for eternal life.
I remember the first time, as a college freshman, that I began to talk directly to other students about their relationship with Christ and their hope of eternal life. I remember using a survey to break the ice and start discussion. When I asked Catholics, “When did you become a Christian?” the universal answer was, “When I was baptized.” Then I would ask them, “Do you believe that you will go to heaven when you die?” The almost universal answer was, “I hope so!” And then, following the provided discussion starter, I asked, “On what basis should God allow you into heaven?” The answer time after time was, “Because I have been a good Catholic, sought to obey God’s laws, and taken the communion regularly.” I can never remember hearing the answer of the gospel of free and sovereign grace, which believ-ingly replies, “I expect to be accepted in heaven solely on the basis of God’s grace received by faith, which itself is God’s gift to me!” And I will never forget the first time I led a young man into a decision, not realizing then that such evangelistic methodology is more Roman Catholic than genuinely evangelical, only to ask him the so-called follow-up question, “Where is Christ right now?” He answered happily, “I have received Him into my heart in prayer with you, just as I receive Him into my heart every time I take the Mass.”
When I heard the young man’s answer that evening on the ocean front I determined there and then to understand his answer better, and that was in fact the beginning of a life-long desire to understand Catholic faith and practice. It has led me to attend Catholic conferences, groups, and gatherings. It has led me into dialogue with some lovely people who I have every reason to believe genuinely trust Christ alone to save them, in spite of what they have or have not been taught in their parishes. It has prompted me to watch a good bit of the programming of EWTN, the Catholic cable network. It has taken me into Catholic libraries and bookshops, where I have bought numerous books and teaching tapes. In all of this I keep encountering the same thing I have referred to above. Wherever one turns he will inevitably find either traditional Catholic concepts, with all the old misunderstandings about grace and faith evident in the anathemas of Trent and its attack on “the righteousness which is of faith,” or he will find modern interpretations placed upon these old doctrines that sound much more like the old liberalism of an earlier Protestant era.
Often scholars, aware of debates waged over the centuries, will seek to be careful in how they position themselves on these critical issues, but in the end they are unwilling, or perhaps honestly unable, to assert the straightforward message of justification by faith alone. If, as Luther said, “this is the article of a standing or falling church,” and if he was correct as evangelicals for centuries have believed, then we cannot think of Rome as a church standing on the gospel and the grace of God. She has fallen and has thus lost the marks of the church (cf. chapters 3 and 11).
Furthermore, when one speaks of being a Roman Catholic today the evangelical needs to understand that this statement in itself doesn’t tell much about what the person really believes. (Again, the same is true often with those who refer to themselves as “born again” evangelicals.) John R. W. Stott, writing in Christianity Today in 1977, said, “For what exactly is the church of Rome that one can relate to it? The old illusion of a monolithic structure has been shattered. Today it appears almost as pluriform as Protestantism. What does it believe and teach? Has it really changed? Or is its old boast of changelessness and irreformability true?”30
When Protestants and Catholics discussed theological concerns prior to our generation, the discussion always arrived at the question of religious authority. Further discussion only made it increasingly plain that Rome believed in a church that interpreted the Scripture, while Protestantism affirmed a perspicuous, self-interpreting Bible that had final authority over the institution of the church. Now the ground underneath both traditions has suffered the opening of massive fault lines. In the words of one Protestant, “Prior to the pontificate of John ΧΧΙII, Protestant relations with Roman Catholicism could be characterized as negative but clean-cut.”31 The foreseeable future offers no reason to believe that things will go back to the way they were when they were “clean-cut.”
Various modern factions can be observed within a pluriform and often pluralistic Roman Catholicism:
1 Liberals, who, as we’ve previously noted, are at the forefront of Catholic higher education and written philosophy and theology.
2 Extreme syncretists, who mix all kinds of religious practice with Christian symbols and teaching. This form of Catholicism is often seen in Third World countries like Papua New Guinea, Haiti, among Brazilian Indians, and so on, where multitudes of baptized Catholics are voodoo worshipers, believing in magic more than in the confessed essentials of historic Christianity.
3 Nominal Catholics, by far the largest number worldwide in the Roman Church. In America only a little more than one in four Catholics now attend the Mass weekly. Among these are the vast numbers who practice birth control, and who often believe in “abortion on demand.” They remain members only because the church does not remove them or they do not take steps to remove themselves, a step almost never taken by even the most radical ex-Catholic.
4 Conservative (moderate) Catholics, who are those who seek to maintain a kind of halfway position, defending the magisterium and the historic councils and creeds, yet identifying with the changes of Vatican II and accepting the modernizations and theological shifts, albeit with some reservations.
5 Archconservatives, or old traditionalists, like the late Marcel Lefebvre of France, who along with many others who did not necessarily follow him publicly, wanted to maintain the old Latin Mass. These are the few remaining antiecumenical Catholics. Lefebvre, who supported the papacy and its traditional dogmas, was expelled from the church by the very papacy he defended. These are Catholics who often feel that Pope John ΧΧIIΙ and Pope Paul VI developed suicidal policies that must be resisted.
6 Charismatics, a group that draws much attention from evangelicals, but which seems no longer to be growing as rapidly as in the 1970s and 1980s. Charismatics were initially a disruptive force to the Catholic establishment, but now they have been quieted and absorbed into the larger stream of the church, a phenomenon that is common in Roman Catholic history.32
It is for this reason that evangelicals must be concerned by much of the discussion of our time that speaks of the two traditions coming together. On what basis are we coming together? This question must be honestly asked. George Carey, the present Archbishop of Canterbury, underscores my very concern when he observes positively regarding the charismatic renewal among Catholics and Protestants, “It is the only revival in history which has united evangelicals on the one hand, with their strong emphasis on the death of Christ and full atonement, and Roman Catholics on the other, with their emphasis on the sacraments. Somehow charismatic experiences have brought together people who on the face of it have little in common theologically.”33
This strange observation, written by an Anglican leader who considers himself an evangelical, sends up warning flares that trouble serious Protestant evangelicals who have not abandoned the gospel insights of Luther and the Reformers. If we have a unity with “little in common theologically,” one must be troubled over what kind of unity we really have come to. It is clearly not the unity Christ prayed for in John 17.
As one committed to the power of the gospel to save those who believe, through faith alone, I am still moved with profound sadness and deep soul anguish when I see the practice of old Romanism the world over. On a recent journey to Brazil I made a trip to the Catholic shrine at Aparecida. Here millions of Brazilians have come to pray and worship before a small, unimpressive wood carving that stands about eighteen inches tall. The story is that in 1717 two fishermen found this statue in the Paraiba River. Was it an idol, or simply a piece of Indian artwork? We do not know for sure. As has been typical of Catholicism, miraculous powers were soon attributed to this statue and she (?) was soon elevated before the masses of superstitious worshipers who came to pray and adore her. Today this Jtatue is the patron saint of Brazil!
As I watched I saw people praying, weeping, bowing, giving money, and laying aside their braces and crutches in claiming a miracle at Aparecida. I was witnessing the type of Catholicism that still grips millions of souls the world over. Built around this phenomenon is the second largest basilica in the world. Only St. Peter’s is larger. A booming tourist business has developed, and the Brazilian government has a vested interest in the site.
Walking through this huge basilica one can see rooms where the bodies of former spiritual leaders are buried. People are touching and praying over the tombs of the deceased. “The Miracle Room,” where photographs and letters by the thousands hang, all giving testimony to the power of the lady of Aparecida and the miracles she has granted, is a place of amazement. Vast amounts of money are collected from the faithful, and Mass is said regularly at various hours of the day.
I could not help but wonder what some of my Roman Catholic friends in the U.S. would make of all this. Perhaps they would deciy it in much the same way I decry the hucksterism of evangelical televangelism and the promise of cures for the faithful who pray and give their money.
What lingers with me even now is Pope John Paul II's visit to Aparecida. Did he condemn this whole business as “old Catholicism” of the sort that needed to be cleaned up by a great sweeping biblical reformation? Quite the contrary; he blessed the statue and thereby endorsed the superstition and idolatry by lending his profound weight to the whole business.
Can the reader not understand why those who love the Lord Jesus and are genuinely jealous for His glory and worship are deeply distressed by places like Aparecida? In a country where there is an even more desperate need for hearing the gospel, due to centuries of superstition and spiritual ignorance, is it any wonder that evangelicals still experience great soul trouble over this type of Catholicism?
Kenneth Kantzer observed in 1986 that Rome is a church on the move. He stated that the most exciting change is a new freedom for the gospel in our time. Openness among many to read, study, and hear the Bible’s teaching is a sign of better things if the trend continues. It is this that many Protestant evangelicals have experienced positively with their friends who are in the Roman Catholic Church.
Where, then, is the Roman Catholic chinch today, and where is it going? Part of it is rigorously defending its traditions, changing only enough to survive. Other segments, particularly its lay members [primarily in North America, it should be noted], are becoming evangelical. Much of its leadership is moving in the direction of liberal Protestantism. Pope John Paul II has noticed his theologians’ leaning toward liberalism and has firmly asked them to stand by the content of the traditional faith. His own ecumenical efforts have turned toward the Eastern Orthodox churches. At the same time, he has fostered dialogue with the World Council of Churches.34
If this observation be true, how does this movement among Roman Catholics affect evangelicals?
It is my conviction that we are at a critical crossroads in Christian history, especially in the West. As the new paganism threatens us at every turn, so the church is in danger of continually surrendering its truth claims to the relativistic thought of our age. As Roman Catholicism has opened the door to us in Vatican II we must be careful that we know how to respond to this “open door.” We must understand the real direction of Roman Catholic thought, and we must be vigilant for the truth of Scripture. We must avoid negative criticism that is unfounded, but we must also guard against naive assumptions of new agreements. The writings of a converted conservative Presbyterian minister like Scott Hahn, considered by Kim Riddlebarger (chapter 10), and conversions to Rome by former evangelicals like Tom Howard should give us pause when we are inclined to think there is no remaining appeal left in old Catholic dogma and in the lure of an authoritative papacy and church tradition. We must understand what it means to be truly evangelical in our age and how to stand for the gospel in thought and deed, powerfully and clearly. My concern, theologically, is that we are losing the gospel in evangelicalism, and thus we can easily enter into all kinds of discussion and agreements that ultimately lead us into the sacrifice of the very message from which we get our identity—the Evangel.
What does all of this mean for us in coming years?
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
A few years ago, one of this century’s most highly regarded liberal scholars, Paul Tillich, observed that the Protestant era was raiding. He said, in essence, that America stood much closer to the non-Reformation tradition than it did to the Reformation tradition.331 was shocked by this observation when I first read it. I assumed Tillich didn’t understand, since he was not an evangelical. I now believe he was correct in his analysis of the American religious scene. Modern evangelicalism is, in reality, more Catholic than Protestant.
Louis Bouyer, a French Protestant scholar who converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1950s, points out in his apologia for conversion to Rome, that evangelical revivals, particularly in America, often unintentionally brought the Protestant movement much closer to Rome.36 What does Bouyer mean? Simply that Catholic spirituality makes the inward work of grace central to its understanding of salvation. Modern revivalism has done exactly the same thing.
The Protestant Reformers (as seen in chapter 5) certainly made room for the internal work of the Holy Spirit, but the good news was what God did for sinful man outside of his heart. He gives an alien righteousness, He saves a man based solely on what Christ did objectively at the Cross. If the human sinner looks anywhere else, he ultimately looks away from the objective gospel and thus away from the righteousness of God. Faith, created in the heart by the active work of the Holy Spirit, produces fruit in repentance, good works, and outward service to God and man. The believer, we can say properly in this way of thinking, is truly saved by works—the works of Christ alone! The works the believer produces, by the Spirit’s inward work, are the response of the believer to the grace of God; thus they have no part in creating faith or in making the sinner right with God in any sense of the word. As Protestantism has moved further and further into mysticism and subjectivism since the nineteenth century, it has proportionately moved away from its evangelical foundation. This move into subjectivism, combined in recent years with post-Enlightenment relativism, undermines our confidence that truth can be truly known and understood. It has virtually destroyed the foundation upon which the whole Protestant evangelical movement was established.
Harold Bloom, a contemporary critic of religion in the United States, writes of our present civil religion and its radical departure from confessional Christian Protestantism in The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post-Christian Nation. His important book should trouble many evangelicals because it points out the present state of religion in a manner that ought to awaken us to the national religion we have created in our own image. He adds to our understanding of this present hour when he adroitly writes:
Religion, in the ostensibly Protestant United States, is something subtly other than Christianity, though to say that we are a post-Christian country is misleading. Rather, we are post-Protestant, and we live a persuasive redefinition of Christianity. It is so persuasive that we refuse to admit that we have revised the traditional religion into a faith that better fits our national temperament, aspirations, and anxieties. A blend of ancient heresies and nineteenth-century stresses, the American Religion moves towards the twenty-first century with an unrestrained triumphalism, easily convertible into our political vagaries.37
What then is the answer?
We need a new biblical reformation as we enter the twenty-first century—a reformation that is like the old one in certain areas. This is true precisely because we have lost our understanding of the gospel and its objective essence. We also need a reformation unlike the old one in that this one needs to challenge the total abandonment of truth in our day. It must be a reformation that challenges the revivalism of American church life for the past 150 years. It must be a reformation that affirms doctrinal recovery and denies present idolatries—e.g., materialism and the power that corrupts us, ministerial moral breakdown that has devastated our credibility, therapeutic models of ministry that have completely reinterpreted the theology of the Scriptures into a man-centered message, and public worship services that are aimed directly at fulfilling man’s felt needs at the expense of the transcendent holiness of a sovereign God who is feared and reverenced.
In No Place for Truth David Wells writes, “At moments like this the customary response to the sense of Christian inadequacy, whether in relation to God or some aspect of the Christian message, has been to call for revival.”38 This call has usually been associated with a Finneyesque type of idea that sees the church as rejuvenated through its own efforts, albeit joined with the Spirit’s work. What is needed is more than a recovery of excitement and spiritual interest. We can have that, and not one thing will substantially change. Revival, as conceived of in the era prior to Finney (1792-1875), was always understood to be a sovereign visitation of God upon the church when the gospel was preached and the Scriptures were firmly established as central in the life and method of the church. Such a true awakening in our time must be joined with a wholesale reformation, or any genuine spiritual rain that may be given will undoubtedly fall upon a setting where it will be quickly lost on a people unprepared to establish it in the clearest biblical categories of grace and truth.
In the 1992 Public Broadcast System television miniseries, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, author and narrator Randall Balmer portrays twentieth-century evangelical Christianity in America as a subculture that insulates itself from society and retreats from intellectual pursuit in the marketplace of modern ideas. He shows how the last decade has seen an emergence of this very same subculture into mainstream America, but with one problem—it is still the same antirational, anticultural movement, but now bolstered by the display of newly discovered political and social muscle. Balmer may overstate his thesis, and surely certain parts of his series can be faulted, but on the whole I fear he has spoken the truth, albeit too painfully and prophetically for most evangelicals to accept his point until they reject much of what they are presently doing in the culture.
It was painful for this writer to hear Balmer speaking of how he never “got it” while worshiping among evangelicals—by which he apparently meant the great emotional experience that many evangelicals refer to as conversion. I wondered: Did Balmer begin to think, as I did in my college days, that evangelical Christianity had little to do with critical analysis, the use of reason, and commitment to creativity? Did he get the message so many of us have gotten—just surrender and believe, that is, do not doubt? This kind of evangelicalism is a blanket denial of the historic Protestant Reformation and the truths it so firmly rediscovered in the Scriptures.
What we need, quite obviously, is a deep, intellectual, doctrinal, moral reformation grounded in Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, and Scripture alone. What we need is a sweeping, true, great awakening in our generation, one grounded in the objective gospel and the complete authority of Scripture. It is precisely because of this great need, perceived so plainly by critics like Bloom and Balmer, that this book has been written. This present volume has been written not only to help evangelicals and Catholics understand one another better, which is good in itself, but to foster the kind of understanding that will create a new climate for true reformation and revival in our time. The desire of each author has been to explain some of the important forces that were at work in our history and are at work in the present age to shape contemporary Catholicism, both its faith and its practice. We have sought to understand as well the Protestant evangelical response to Roman Catholicism, both historic and current. We have seen that evangelicals in some areas agree, while in others we must voice dissent that is based on our loyalty to the Word of God and the gospel. This is what ultimately keeps us apart in this present hour and will undoubtedly keep us divided unless God does something we cannot presently see or humanly forecast.
There was a time when evangelicals were universally convinced, as John W. Montgomery wrote in the 1960s, “that considerations of truth must precede considerations of union, unity, worship, or fellowship.”391 fear that such time is no more and the dangers of present discussion with Catholicism are problematic in many cases precisely because both sides of the discussion are unsure of what they actually believe and what they are genuinely committed to as believers.
Make no mistake about it: the legacy of Vatican II seems to be one of change and tension. Comments evangelical theologian James I. Packer:
More than at any time since the Reformation, Catholics and Protestants are now divided in the same way, into conservatives, radicals, and those who can only be called compromisers, and who battle constantly within their own communities on the same set of issues—Scripture as revelation; Christian supernaturalism; the Christian mission; the meaning of worship and piety.40
Change is desirable, but we must not be naive about the nature of such change, or the purpose of it. Change for the sake of change is clearly not always healthy.
As long as Rome maintains a two-source view of authority (the idea that God’s authority comes to us through the Bible and the traditions of the church), we will not be able to solve our serious disagreements. And as long as Rome insists on an understanding of justification by faith that undermines the Pauline doctrine of grace as explained in the epistles to the Galatians and the Romans, we shall remain divided.
At the same time many evangelicals get quite shaky when they read a book like this one. They will see only the potential for compromise written everywhere. Why? The mere mention of working together in any arena sounds so, well, so liberal!
Most evangelicals do not realize that the concern for finding and preserving Christian unity in the post-Reformation era was birthed out of the evangelical missions movement of the nineteenth century, not the liberal social agenda of the twentieth century. It was almost always the burden of earlier evangelical missionary efforts to preserve the unity of believers wherever possible, especially in alien cultures hostile to the gospel. Further, how can we read the New Testament and not sense the concern of the Epistles for preserving unity in the gospel. Heresy itself is independent belief and willful action that separates one from the church.
Furthermore, it is extremely important to realize (as we observed in chapter 12) that evangelicals have always understood their practice and faith as that of historic Christianity and not a modern departure from apostolic, catholic, Christian faith. As we have previously seen, it was Luther’s view that the Roman Catholic Church had left the gospel and the Scriptures, and
thus, in reality, it had left the church of Jesus Christ. Much polemic flowed from both sides in this debate, but let it be understood that Protestant evangelicalism is not, inherently, schismatic. Let Wells again have a word to guide us here:
The New Testament writers are unequivocally in favor of Christian unity provided it is established on a Christian basis. That is to say, Christians must find their unity in the same truth which they profess rather than in some common project in which they participate. Furthermore, the truth they profess must reiterate the truth ... the apostles taught. This is the apostolic succession ... the New Testament teaches.41
What we stand for as historic evangelicals is not anti-Catholicism. Luther was not an anti-Catholic. He was a Catholic initially, and many of those who tutored him in the faith were Catholics whom he dearly loved. He longed for the church of his day to return to the apostolic gospel. He labored for her recoveiy and left the church of his birth only when he was forced to by the events that culminated in Rome’s refusal to hear the gospel. There were many in Luther’s day who did hear the gospel. Some did not leave the Roman Catholic Church with him. Political and social reasons, as well as personal concerns that are beyond our ability to analyze, all came to (day in these choices. The point is this: though Luther attacked the papacy as an institution that perpetrated awful confusion and abuse of power, he still counted people on both sides of the divide as brothers. He was concerned, very early cm in his own context, that many souls had followed the evangelical Reformation in Germany, yet without new life in Christ through the gospel. It is for much more of this kind of genuine evangelical spirit that this book has appealed. What needs to be analyzed is not who we talk to, why we talk, or where, but rather, “What is the basis for fellowship (of any kind) and what is the nature of it?” I fear that many conservative evangelicals, myself included, have often tended to judge by appearances and not by truth in a context of love.
This is the appeal the apostle makes to us in Ephesians 4:15 when he charges us to labor at “speaking the truth in love.” We must keep both ends of this in balance. Biblical truth must not be compromised, under any circumstances. Christian character and action must never be compromised either. We must speak the truth, but we can only do so, if we are to be truly Christian, in love. There is enough error cm both sides of this injunction to bring shame to all who have concerned themselves with these great doctrinal issues that have divided us for more than four centuries. Wells adds, “Love must direct us to the point where the biblical Christ is confronted, for truth will only be found here. And it is the truth question alone which must absorb our attention. This is, after all, what theology is all about.”42
The more I have studied Roman Catholicism the more I realize how shades of meaning and thought behind certain Catholic doctrines have been both misunderstood and misrepresented by many evangelicals, including myself. I have resolved to work honestly at fuller understanding of these teachings so that I might speak the truth. I have also realized the pride of place and position that often characterizes Christian doctrinal disputes. Frankly, a part of my mind and spirit thrives on a good debate, especially when I am thoroughly convinced that I am right and the other person is clearly wrong. I don’t always debate a point with a mind “open” to learn and grow, but with resolute determination to give up nothing of the truth as it is revealed in Scripture. I confess, because of my firm belief in God’s sovereignty, that only the Spirit of God can truly give a truth, any Christian truth, to any person. My problem is this: though truth itself is not relative and is never up for negotiation, I am not always ready to respond to the truth. I have defenses of all kinds, made in my sinful self, to keep me from being radically altered by the gospel. But truth can be known. Essential truth is not hidden and made known only to a magisterium, whether it be that of Rome or fundamentalism. As the evangelicals of Luther’s day were wont to say, essential truth is perspicuous, or plain, and it is found only in the written Scripture. Yet I can be so dull, so slow of heart to believe. I do wonder about both Catholics and evangelicals who cannot come to the table of discussion with this much readiness to be humbled before God and His Holy Word.
As I am troubled by certain Protestant misunderstanding and misrepresentation, I am increasingly aware that this street has two sides. When the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States met in 1987 and issued a document on “fundamentalism,” it concerns me that they got a good bit wrong.
Responding to the recent surge of converts into evangelical churches the bishops felt constrained to do something to stop the exodus. They described fundamentalism as a “general approach to life that is typified by unyielding adherence to rigid doctrinal and ideological positions.” They add, further, that fundamentalists “present the Bible, God’s inspired Word, as the only necessary source for teaching about Christ and Christian living.” The bishops went cm to link the teaching that “the Bible alone is sufficient” and that there is in such churches no place “for creeds and other doctrinal formulations” oneaning Rome’s, of course) with the belief “that the Bible is always without error.” Even though one of the theologians involved said the document was aimed at small sects and television evangelists, conservative evangelicals must, by all conscientious commitment to the truth of their faith, be troubled by a response like this. Carl F. H. Henry commented at the time by saying that, while fundamentalism deserves criticism cm certain points, the bishops’ statement takes a swipe at the Protestant Reformation.
This kind of response, noted Henry, is “another way of saying that fundamentalists don’t accept the legitimacy of the papacy and don’t accept the finality of the Roman Catholic Church.” He added, “if Rome wants to fight the battle of the Reformation all over again, that is its prerogative.”43
The same type of concern has surfaced once again in the recently published document “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church” issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in Rome. The highly technical 12S page study not only supports the use of questionable conclusions from historical-critical methodology but blames the fundamentalist approach to the Bible on the Reformers. It significantly distorts a Protestant view of inerrancy and attacks the evangelical doctrine of Scripture aggressively. When this kind of attack on the Word of God continues, how can any biblical theological discussion advance meaningfully?
Finally, if we are to see the much needed new reformation that I have written of, we must be about the work of “speaking the truth in love” more obviously. Nothing is gained in the consideration of Roman Catholic doctrine, by either Catholics or evangelicals, when we avoid those doctrines that divide us. I have learned to appreciate Mary for her loving faithfulness to God. Reading Catholic material has stimulated some of this appreciation, but I am still convinced, with S. Lewis Johnson in chapter 5, that Marian theological formulations in the Roman tradition are harmful and potentially fatal to true faith in Christ alone. Should I keep quiet about this when I consider the teaching of the Word of God with my Catholic neighbor? Not if I love him and am still convinced that he hasn’t gotten this right yet. I don’t have to put labels and aspersions on him that hurt and wound, but I owe it to God and to my friend to “speak the truth. ” I also owe it to him to do it “in love.”
I am convinced that with rare exception, and that in opposition to the official creeds of the church and the writings of major Catholic theologians, Roman Catholic theology still does not believe or understand justification by faith alone. Avery Dulles, a Jesuit theologian who is considered somewhat of a moderate, was asked about this important doctrine by Donald Bloesch in an interview published in Christianity Today in 1986. Dulles said, “We do not greatly disagree on the way in which the individual comes to justification: through the grace of Christ accepted in faith.” Bloesch, wisely knowing the history of this debate and the nuances of important differences, asked Dulles to elaborate, to which he added, “The response to Luther was made official at the Council of Trent [1545-63]. In its ‘Decree on Justification,’ the council described the process of justification and insisted that it is through faith that one is justified.”44
You might well ask, “What then is wrong with Dulles’s statement?” Bloesch asked Dulles if it is the word process that is the key difference. For Rome justification is a process inside of me, a process whereby I am being saved and made right with God. For Luther, and for a true evangelical, justification is not a process, it is a finished work done outside of me by Christ. When I am justified I am accepted into fellowship with God freely. I can say with Paul, “There is therefore, now, no condemnation” (Romans 8:1). Upon this crucial hinge Luther defended his entire understanding of a vital and radically different gospel message. If I “speak the truth in love,” then I must not leave this doctrine aside in the relationship, as almost all modern Catholic-evangelical discussions seem to do.
And when my Roman Catholic friend wishes to define the issue of authority in terms of a church that gave us the Scriptures and that interprets them properly, giving me a source of authority that is ultimately above, or over, the written Scriptures, I cannot remain silent. My conscience bears witness to this truth taught by the church Fathers and restored in practice by Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century. Truth demands that I press this matter forward in any discussion where the truth is under attack, either explicitly or implicitly.
Our present conciliatory atmosphere has allowed a new level of discussion. It is my hope that a book such as this one displays something of that good spirit. Having said this, however, I concur with G. C. Berkouwer: “The Reformation did not break with the church. ... On the contrary the church rejected it.” The Reformers, to use Berkouwer’s words again, “knocked on the door, but the Council of Trent shut out the sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura of the Reformation.” This leads Berkouwer to deduce—properly, I think—that “eventually the men of conciliatory temper will have to face quite seriously the question, Why did Rome reject the Reformation?”45
In 1987, then-Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus wrote a book by the intriguing title The Catholic Moment. I was fascinated by his thought. He considered what he called the paradox of the church in the postmodern world.46 This is similar to the question Wells raises in his more recent book No Place for Truth. Since writing that book, Neuhaus, whose writings I find almost always useful, has converted to Roman Catholicism. As I have thought about this subject for some months I continue to think, What if this were to become, as in the sixteenth century, the evangelical moment?
The true Protestant spirit has great force; it has great meaning. It is the spirit of life that flows out of the proper view of God’s authority and God’s glory—it is not simply a spirit of protest against Rome, or any other fallen institution. It is a strength that has great recovering and healing power. As Berkouwer has said, “The power of the Reformation was not the strength of man, but the strength which manifested itself in weakness. T can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ That was the power of the Reformation.”47
That is my prayer and has been for a number of years now. My hope is not that we might defend or prop up a sectarian movement known as “evangelicalism,” or “Protestantism,” but rather that we might see another great era for the gospel like that which the Spirit began when He powerfully opened the eyes of an Augustinian monk in the early sixteenth century, and through him broke open much of Europe, launching the greatest “recovery” movement in the history of the church. Luther did not get it all right, as no reformer or theologian ever does. But he got two vitally important things right—the doctrine of Scripture and the doctrine of the gospel. Precisely here the modern evangelical church gropes about in weakness like a giant without sight. Precisely here we must seize the present moment and recover the spirit of the older, truer, sounder evangelicalism.
Will we see another great reformation? Will there be another revival like that which broke out through the recovery of the Scriptures and the gospel in the sixteenth century? God alone knows, but we who love Him must labor for it and pray that He might be gracious to His people even in these dark times. This could be the evangelical moment. Let us pray that it will be and that revival mercies might flow again across Western nations.
Notes
1. Charles E. Colson, The Body (Dallas: Word, 1992), 114.
2. Texe Mans, “Texe Mans Asks Chuck Colson: Will You Sell Your Soul to the Devil for a Million Dollars,” Flashpoint: A Newsletter Ministry of Texe Marrs (June 1993), 1.
3. John Robbins, “The Counterfeit Gospel of Charles Colson, Part 2,” The Trinity Review (February 1994): 4.
4. Keith A. Fournier, Evangelical Catholics (Nashville: Nelson, 1990), vi.
5. Paul G. Schrotenboer, ed., Roman Catholicism: A Contemporary Evangelical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), 12.
6. David Duggins, “Across the Divide,” Moody (November 1993), 14.
7. Ibid., 14-15.
8. George Weigel, “Post Vatican II,” Eternity (October 1986), 21. Weigel is a Roman Catholic theologian who has worked alongside many traditions in dealing with ethics and public policy issues.
9. Ibid.
10. Lorraine Boettner, Roman Catholicism (Philadelphia: Presb. & Ref., 1965), 447. Boettner is typical of older evangelical writers in that he seeks to show what is wrong with Roman Catholicism by treating the doctrines of Trent as normative in all cases. His quote here displays an approach often taken by conservatives that is neither accurate nor helpful.
11. David F. Wells, Revolution in Rome (Downers Grove, II1.: InterVarsity, 1972), 19. This volume, which I quote quite heavily in my response to conciliar post Vatican II Catholicism, is the wisest and most cogently and compactly argued commentary written by an evangelical that I know. I am sorry that it is out of print and wish that a revised edition might be done in the light of nearly twenty-five years of history.
12. Wells, Revolution in Rome, 24.
13. Weigel, “Post Vatican II,” 24.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 26.
16. Ibid.
17. Robert A. Burns, Roman Catholicism: Yesterday and Today (Chicago: Loyola Univ. Press, 1992), 8.
18. Ibid., 13.
19. Ibid., 13-18.
20. Wells, Revolution in Rome, 83.
21. Ibid., 86.
22. Constitution on the Church, 9; cited in Wells, Revolution in Rome, 87.
23. B. C. Butler, The Theology of Vatican II, 167; cited in Wells, Revolution in Rome, 88.
24. Wells, Revolution in Rome, 90.
25. Ibid., 90-94.
26. David Duggins, “Across the Divide,” Moody (November 1993), 17.
27. John Warwick Montgomery, Ecumenicity, Evangelicals, and Rome (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1969), 39.
28. David Wells, “Catholicism at the Crossroads,” Eternity (September 1987), 14.
29. Harold O. J. Brown, “What Do Catholics Believe?” Moody (November 1993), 21.
30. John R. W. Stott, “Evangelicals and Roman Catholics,” Christianity Today, 12 August 1977, 30.
31. Montgomeiy, Ecumenicity, Evangelicals, and Rome, 33.
32. Malachi Martin, The Final Conclave (New York: Stein & Day, 1978). Martin is always an interesting read for those who would like to read a popular Roman Catholic author who is often critical of his church while remaining faithful to her.
33. George Carey, A Tale of Two Churches: Can Protestants and Catholics Get Together? (Downers Grove, 111.: Inter Varsity, 1985), 17.
34. Kenneth Kantzer, “Church on the Move,” Christianity Today, 7 November 1986, 17.
35. Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 225-26, 239.
36. Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1957), 186-97. This is a very interesting and impressive apologia for a Protestant who converted to Rome in the 1950s.
37. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 45.
38. David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1993), 296. This is perhaps the most important call to a new reformation in the evangelical churches that we have in our time. Professor Wrils knows Catholicism, and he knows evangelicalism. Highly recommended for all serious evangelicals.
39. Montgomery, Ecumenicity, Evangelicals, and Rome, 21.
40. James I. Packer, “Counterpoint: A Protestant Assessment,” Eternity (October 1986), 25.
41. Wells, Revolution in Rome, 122-23.
42. Ibid., 126.
43. “Catholic Bishops Address Protestant Fundamentalism,” Christianity Today, 11 December 1987, 54.
44. “America’s Catholics: What They Believe—Catholic Doctrine According to Jesuit Theologian Aveiy Dulles,” an interview with Avery Dulles conducted by Donald Bloesch, Christianity Today, 7 November 1986, 26-27.
45. G. C. Berkouwer, Recent Developments in Roman Catholic Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 31.
46. Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987).
47. Berkouwer, Recent Developments in Roman Catholic Thought, 74-75.