Acknowledgments
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editor would like to thank the board of Reformation & Revival Ministries, Inc. for their support and genuine friendship in laboring with me for reformation in our generation. Each brother is a source of immense encouragement and faithful counsel.
Thanks also to Thomas N. Smith, a true friend who sticks closer than a brother and has done more to teach me to think critically and biblically than anyone in my life.
Thanks also to Dr. Donald Anderson, a faithful editor who serves me in his professional retirement in ways that this word of gratitude cannot adequately express.
A special place will always remain in my heart for the members of Trinity Baptist Church, Wheaton, Illinois, who encouraged me as their pastor for sixteen years and allowed me to read, grow, and minister with such freedom that all I now do in both writing and itinerant ministry is a part of their ongoing contribution to the larger body of Christ.
Mentors, friends, family, and even critics have helped me in far too many ways to express, but special acknowledgment is due Matthew and Stacy, two children who make my life as dad a real joy and bring continual delight to my heart.
Finally, thanks to the one person, my wife Anita, who has shared this project with me for well over a year, giving encouragement, genuine support, and much labor in reading the manuscripts and in the preparation of several important parts of the volume, especially the glossary. She always believed I could write and edit and urged me to stay with it when I might have given up!
INTRODUCTION
John H. Armstrong
An old English proverb says, “Use soft words and hard arguments.” If anything does not describe the ensuing centuries of debate between the heirs of the Protestant Reformation and Roman Catholicism it is this old proverb! Exceptions have popped up over the years and recent developments have fostered some improvement in the tone of the debate, but very often the landscape has been littered by heated debate, often without understanding truly profound theological disagreements. It is almost like two historic ships passing in the night without seeing or hearing one another. Neither side can claim innocence in terms of the harsh manner in which issues have often been argued. Religious tolerance and the willingness to disagree without persecution have only recently marked the spirit of both traditions, at least in Europe and North America. All who name the Name should approach such disagreements with a spirit of humility when they consider the history and issues of religious disputation between Roman Catholics and Protestant evangelicals.
As the twentieth century comes to a close, the ground is moving beneath both historic Western traditions in a manner that differs significantly from any time since the sixteenth century. We are living through an era of rapid change. Said one statesman some years ago, “All the certainties of the industrial society in which we live are disintegrating. We are witnessing an erosion of ideologies, economic theories, and traditional culture.”' Western civilization is experiencing shifts of seismic proportions, and the Christian church is caught up in these major movements. Let me explain.
Protestantism has been fractured in this century both by the devastating effects of theological liberalism and by the culturally bankrupt reactions of an increasingly sterile fundamentalism. On the one side, the old historic denominations are scurrying about trying to find ways to stop their bleeding, as historic churches and groups experience a slow death through the chilling effects of a blatant denial of ancient Christian confessions. This was summed up for me personally a few years ago when I stood in the study of a Protestant pastor who was serving a local church historically related to the Great Awakening and the best traditions of evangelical religion. I kept trying to “get a read” on what this pastor believed and affirmed. He kept telling me that he stood in the Protestant liberal tradition, much of which he insisted was in the teaching of the Protestant Reformers. I finally asked him, “Will you affirm the Apostles’ Creed with your mind and heart?” He dodged my question several times and noticeably refused to reply. I thought as I left his study that afternoon, What fellowship can I have with a man who will not ascribe honestly to the essentials of historic Christianity?
Virtually the opposite experience has frequently been mine as well. As I travel about in more evangelical circles I find myself talking to ministers in a more conservative tradition, who almost always consider themselves quite orthodox, yet they often don’t even know the doctrines of the Apostles’ Creed. The language of the Chalcedonian Creed (where the essential nature of Christ’s person was carefully stated) sounds like a strange dialect unless they vaguely remember something from an old seminary course. Their understanding of the great Christological issues that faced the church in her early centuries is almost nil, and their view of the development of Christian doctrine and practice extends over the inadequate range of some twenty years What excites these evangelical pastors is church growth, contemporary worship style, and popular music that will move the people. Far be it from these evangelicals to engage in serious discussion of historic debates that literally shaped the streams of the two great Western traditions of Christianity. (Do they even realize that there is an Eastern tradition?) For these, the term evangelical has become an adjective used to describe a certain methodology and conservative cultural stance. Historically the word is a noun and a virtual synonym for the theology of salvation (sola fide, sola gratia) as taught by the Protestant Reformers. That is, to be evangelical was to be Protestant.
In a significant book, No Place for Truth, Professor David Wells sums up my observations well:
As evangelicalism has continued to grow numerically, it has seeped through its older structures and now spills out in all directions, producing a family of hybrids whose theological connections are quite baffling: evangelical Catholics, evangelicals who are Catholic evangelical liberationists, evangelical feminists, evangelical ecumenists, ecumenists who are evangelicals, young evangelicals, orthodox evangelicals, radical evangelicals, liberal evangelicals, liberals who are evangelical, and charismatic evangelicals. The word evangelical, precisely because it has lost its confessional dimension, has become descriptively anemic. To say that someone is an evangelical says little about what they are likely to believe (although it says more if they are older and less if they are younger). And so the term is forced to compensate for its theological weakness by borrowing meaning from adjectives the very presence of which signals the fragmentation and disintegration of the movement. What is now primary is not what is evangelical but what is adjectivally distinctive, whether Catholic, liberationist, feminist, ecumenist, young, orthodox, radical, liberal, or charismatic. It is, I believe, the dark prelude to death, when parasites have finally succeeded in bringing down their host. Amid the clamor of all these new modes of evangelical faith there is the sound of a death rattle.2
On the other side of the great Protestant-Roman Catholic historical divide one sees some of the same twentieth-century forces at work. Borrowing from theological liberalism and eating the poisonous fruit of post-Enlightenment modernity, much of Roman Catholic theology and practice has drifted away from its historical roots in the Christian tradition. Relativism reaches from the best Roman Catholic educational institutions all the way down to the priest and his parish committee who no longer believe the doctrines of their own church. The problems of authority have cut deeply into every aspect of Roman Catholic faith and practice. If the reader doubts this observation consider what all the surveys tell us about Catholic practice regarding the papal teaching on birth control. The tradition of the church is maintained, not because it is true but simply because it is my tradition. Radical feminism, critical views regarding the real Jesus, liberational social theologies—and old-fashioned syncretism dressed in new and modern clothing— all threaten to destroy the Christian foundations of Roman Catholicism. Even John Paul II leaves us with confusion when he corrects the liberals in his own church and calls upon the curia to address problem theologians like Hans Kung, while at the same time he prays with Hindus, Buddhists, and other non-Christian leaders. More than one Roman Catholic is asking, “What is going on? Why has my church left its foundations? What do we really believe?”
In the midst of this confusion a small, new, quite evangelistic, movement in the Roman Catholic Church has arisen that calls for the devout Catholic to understand and commit himself to all of the centuries-old doctrines of the Council of Trent. It was this council, convened during the second phase of the Protestant movement, that promulgated the anti-evangelical positions that effectively slammed the door on meaningful ecumenism in the sixteenth centuiy. Devotion to Mary, to the saints, and to distinctively Roman Catholic sacramentalism is alive and well in these circles and is being urged as the way to a new spiritual revival and genuine Catholic reformation. Converted Protestant evangelicals are now joining ranks and urging young Catholics to remain in the fold while separated evangelicals are aggressively recruited for the church. Those who strongly question these movements are often referred to as “anti-Catholics.”3
Notable examples of these trends and the converts made through them abound. Many evangelical radio and television outlets give or sell considerable time to this movement, only expanding their effect in many quarters. We will look at this trend and the new converts who are turning to Roman Catholicism.
And now a significant group of leading evangelical and Roman Catholic theologians, ethicists, writers, and teachers have signed a major document of agreement known as “Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium” (April 1994). This document, recently reported in the media and much discussed at the present moment, has raised the level of discussion between evangelicals and Roman Catholics to a whole new level, for better or for worse. What are evangelicals, concerned as they must be for the truth confessed by their theological forebearers and committed to serious evangelism in a Protestant biblical manner, to make of a document that properly cites areas of considerable agreement but at the same time urges a moratorium of sorts on overt efforts to call Roman Catholics to find confessionally sound New Testament churches where Word and sacrament are still ordered by the Bible?
Into this uniquely contemporary context this present book is directed. It is not an anti-Catholic book, as a perusal of the essays and the tone of the contributors will readily show. It is an attempt at candid consideration of where we agree and where we still disagree. Many of us count as Christian friends sane who are communicant members of the Roman Catholic Church.
We are all serious evangelical Protestants who believe that our tradition reflects the very concerns of the councils of early Christianity. We think of ourselves as those who genuinely affirm the historic teachings of the Christian church. Though Roman Catholic apologists have often accused our forefathers of schism, we rather believe that the evangelicals of the sixteenth century stood on the gospel and affirmed the same view of the Scripture as that universally held by the church Fathers. We do not desire to perpetuate division or separation. We are heartened by certain changes in the twentieth century. We are disheartened by others. We do take the prayer of Jesus in John 17 quite seriously. We have no other choice since we are under the authority of the Word of God.
We hope to show where evangelicals agree with elements of Roman Catholic doctrine. We do have much in common. We affirm the same formulations regarding Christ. We affirm, with those Roman Catholics who have not taken the liberal apple of modern relativism, that Jesus is both God and Man, that He was crucified, that He died a literal death, and that He was buried and on the third day rose again. We affirm His bodily ascensioi and His coming again at the end of this age. In clearest distinction from the bankrupt modern theologies of both our traditions we affirm with conservative Roman Catholics that the hope of fallen man is in the person of Jesus. We both believe that fallen man needs the forgiveness of sin, that his oily hope is in God’s grace, and that heaven and hell are realities that must be taken with complete seriousness.
In this present age we affirm, further, that there is much that we can and should cooperate upon in the public arena. As Astern nations face moral and spiritual bankruptcy and a continual slide into neopaganism, we see ourselves standing as cobelligerents against the encroaching darkness of cultural breakdown. We raise, properly, our collective voices against abortion, euthanasia, marital breakdown, the destruction of the family, and the kind of statism that destroys the national soul. In nations where the political situation is one of civil liberty and democratic ideals we can stand together against the forces of secularization.
At the same time, as Protestant evangelicals, we wish to affirm our loyalty to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We do not believe that the Protestant Reformers were errorists, or heretics, as Rome labeled them at the time, but careful scholars and courageous ministers who recovered and preached the gospel in a time of great awakening. We fear that too many of our peers have apologized for the Protestant Reformation, and, though we do not agree with all of the rhetoric or tone of the sixteenth-century debate, we stand in awe of the faithfulness of those noble souls to whom the gospel of Jesus Christ was “the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). We are indebted to them in that we believe they stood solidly upon the grace of God alone, received by faith alone, mediated to believing sinners through Christ alone, and grounded in the authority of Scripture alone. It was this evangelical heritage that the Reformers gave to us, and we thank God for it to this day. We count ourselves as debtors because of their faithfulness to the centrality of the gospel.
This book is meant to be both an apologetic and a dialogue. It seeks to explain and support the Protestant evangelical heritage by looking at our history and our theology. It will also examine some of the issues that still keep us apart, though this division saddens us. It shows why the two central tenets of the Protestant Reformers, the so-called material and formal principles, are still important to us: namely, justification by grace alone through faith alone, and the sole and final authority of the written Scriptures.
This book will explore some areas often left unconsidered by this generation. It will explore the issue of spirituality and why we differ in our approach to spiritual life as we do, and it will suggest that we need to further efforts at honest dialogue, but not at the expense of the serious disagreements that we still have regarding the nature of the gospel and the authority of the Word of God.
Many issues that evangelicals and Roman Catholics have differed on— and will probably continue to differ on—are not addressed in this book. We have radically differing views regarding the canon of Scripture, the pope’s authority and infallibility as the pastor of the Christian church, the mission of the church in this age, and religious liberty. Massive volumes beyond the scope of a single collection of essays by evangelical scholars would be needed to address profound concerns like these. This present book is not meant to be a final word in an ongoing discussion, but we hope it will be a word that will awaken fellow evangelicals to some of the important issues of our time.
We hope that Roman Catholic readers might sense our desire to “reason together” in a different spirit than that seen in more acrimonious times. We hope all will hear our appeals for unity where we can achieve that, but never at the expense of biblical Christianity. We also hope that these same readers will hear our argument for the gospel that reconciles sinners to God on the basis of grace alone, received through faith alone, and mediated by Christ alone. We also hope that they will understand better our arguments for the finality and sufficiency of the Word of God. No creeds, counsels, or popes have spiritual authority, except they have it under the authority of the written Word. The “priesthood of the believer” is more than an old creedal word with us. Popes and councils, ministers and denominations may err, but the Word of our God shall stand forever. God’s Word does not change, and through it the Holy Spirit will always be about the work of leading the people of God to the spirit of semper reformanda (“always reforming”).
More than anything else this book is offered at a time when a new reformation is needed, one that touches every Christian tradition very deeply and one that touches the entire thought and practice of the individual Christian and the church. This reformation needs to address both old and new concerns. It must, however, like the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, begin with the recovery of the message of the Cross. We are convinced that the gospel is still the power of God unto salvation.
It was Martin Luther who saw this spiritual North Star and called the church back to this central message of the entire Bible. It was Luther who said, “The cross is the criterion of all things.” And in light of 1 Corinthians 2:2 he wrote, “The cross alone is our theology.” It was here, at the Cross, that Luther saw the hidden God revealed in weakness and shame, yet with the radiance of divine glory.
Alister E. McGrath, a contributor to this present volume, writes in another place,
The theology of the cross has assumed a new significance and urgency in the present century, in the aftermath of two world wars and with the ever-increasing threat of a third. It must never be forgotten that the theology of the cross is far more than an historical idea. The increasing recognition of the shallowness and naivetd of much Christian thinking about God and man has caused many to begin to retrace the steps taken by Luther before them, and to join him as he kneels at the foot of the cross, and adores the God who is “hidden in suffering.”4
The current absence of confidence in the gospel message itself parallels the scene in Luther’s day. Can the West be turned before our Christian heritage is completely abandoned? The greatest threat to us as we stand at the beginning of a new millennium is not in the world around us, but in the church itself. Only a great outpouring of God’s Spirit in the recovery of the doctrines of the gospel answers to the need of our time. My prayer is that this present volume will add to this discussion and that a careful consideration of some of these very important issues can be used by the Spirit of God to fuel the fires of a new reformation and spiritual awakening.
Soli Deo Gloria!
Notes
1. Michel Poniatowski, Minister of Interior under former French President Valeiy Giscard d’Estaing, in an interview for the news magazine Pourquoi Pas? of Brussels, quoted in World Press Review 29, No. 10 (October 1982): 23; cited in Verdict, Essay 8 (1983), 3.
2. David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 134.
3. Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” By "Bible Christians'' (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988). Keating, who is professionally trained in law, is now the director of Catholic Answers, a lay organization in San Diego, California, that seeks to defend traditional Tridentine Roman Catholicism (i.e., the dogmas articulated after the time of Luther in opposition to his recovery of grace and the sufficiency of the Scriptures) against what he calls “anti-Catholic” attackers. He helpfully points out a number of weak arguments advanced in the debate by certain “Bible Christians” but fails to deal adequately with the central issues that have divided us since the sixteenth century. Labeling important elements of confessional evangelical Protestant teaching as “anti-Catholic” is no more fair than for Protestants to revert to labels like “Papists.” We can be thankful to Keating for pointing out doctrinal misrepresentations and an uncharitable spirit among some Protestants, but there are still major doctrinal divides that can’t be overcome by merely restating the old doctrinal positions that have divided us for centuries. It is important for the reader to understand that Keating’s work does not represent the professional and academic theology of Roman Catholicism in the American church.
4. Alister E. McGrath, Luther's Theology of the Cross (Oxford, Eng., and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 2-3.