Reviewing the Reformation pt. 3
“I am very happy that I am going to heaven. But when I think of this word of the Lord,
“I shall come soon and bring with me my recompense to give to each according to his works,”
I tell myself that this will be very embarrassing for me, because I have no works . . . .
Very well! He will render to me according to His works for His own sake.”- St. Therese of Lisieux
It has been said, and perhaps rightfully so, that the modern Protestant is all too eager to light the fire…yet neglects to remember the fireplace. The metaphor is a good one, for by it we recognize that, upon spreading rapidly in its uncontained state, the fire quickly grows out of control. That burst of flame has given way to forest fire, and such a ravaging incendiary that not even the fireplace can contain it (nor should it try to).
The “Protestant” sacking of Rome in 1527
There is a naive desire in the heart of any new Christian for the beauty, simplicity, and humility of the Acts 2 church. “Surely,” we cry, “If we could but give up our selfishness and focus on the needs of others, we would be the purest body of believers!” Indeed, what a community that would be! Yet what, we must ask ourselves, would happen when our Gospel message had expanded from the minor fold to become a major flock? When our numbers, reaching in the thousands, held a myriad of true believers…yet 5 or 6 dogmatic heretics, boldly preaching “from the Scriptures” Christ’s lack of divinity, were skillfully interspersed throughout the lot. And suddenly, the picture would be broken.
It would be time to form a council.
A similar situation arises today. It only takes a certain person to disregard nearly 2000 years of Christian tradition, Natural Law, and plain sense to definitively state that “The Bible has been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses” but that Paul only meant that verse to apply to his time. “His writings don’t tickle my 21st-century sensibilities, so they must have been only descriptive for the church then and there, but I have license to do church any way I want” This dynamic has led to splits within the UMC, PCUSA, ACNA, and a civil war is brewing within The SBC, as we speak.
With all of this going on, there has been a renewed interest to attack “papists.” An article published by G3 ministries just 3 weeks ago is titled: Roman Catholicism Is Not Christianity. A quote, superimposed above the rest of the article with the Tweet/post to Facebook button right below, reads:
“The Roman Catholic Church does not embrace Protestant Christians as brothers and sisters in Christ to this very day. Why would we embrace Roman Catholics as Christians?”
Chapter 1 of UNITATIS REDINTEGRATIO Vatican II
This seems to fit the bill of what we mentioned in part I: bold declarations of past battles and an intentional misrepresentation of the distinctions between the two traditions, as they remain today. Not only does it give terrible witness to the charitable spirit of Christianity and our scholastic competence, but it will do little to help Protestants (The Baptists, in this case) fix the problems within their own denominational tradition. Blanket condemnation of “The Catholic Church” is something even the reformers did not do. Calvin noted his Baptism was valid, saw merit in the first few councils, and marked the decline of doctrinal purity within the church as beginning after Gregory I (604 A.D.) Luther continued the Mass, kept three of the seven sacraments, and even had Marian iconography. Both men wrote comments on the Sacraments that would probably see them condemned by the logic of the article above. The Protestant tradition is to be proactively Biblical, not Reactively anti-Catholic.
The article continues by accidentally condemning Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians for holding Baptism as a sacrament, but its most heinous accusation is that “Roman Catholicism is a heretical religion that preaches a different gospel than the gospel of Jesus” because they teach “a works-based system where a person must work their way to God.” We must be careful to speak precisely on what The Gospel is and is not. The gospel is a series of historical facts, not a collection of theories concerning the mechanics of salvation.
The “good news” is that our Lord Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit born of the Virgin Mary,
He was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day, he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead
Regarding the human response to those truths, Justification “by faith alone” may well be true, but it is not the gospel. We are justified by Faith alone, not justified by believing that we are justified by faith alone. The Reformed position demands that our Roman Catholic brothers who “believe with their heart and confess with their tongue” are saved in spite of a different doctrinal understanding of justification.
The alternatives would seem to contradict the purity of the message.
Something beyond the “death, resurrection, and ascension” of our Lord makes up the gospel.
We are justified by doctrinal precision, not Faith in Christ
Protestants can individually recreate a magisterium to excommunicate many of God’s elect with personalized anathemas
Much of the confusion surely comes from a lack of clear communication. As we quipped in pt. 2, “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.” The article above contributes to that problem. The author did not want to understand the Catholic view of justification or their understanding of Faith and the changes that occur in a believer’s heart upon accepting the free gift of Grace, he more than likely read bits of the Catechism wanting to prove Rome has a “false gospel of works.”
Tired of the strawman caricatures of each other held up by both sides of the schism, a noble crew of ecumenical believers met together in order to arrive at an understanding of the chief issue: justification.
The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification was published in 1999 by the Catholic Church's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation. In this declaration, bringing no threats of burning heretics to the conversation, Catholics and Lutherans alike held each other in high regard for their respective desire to uphold the purity of the gospel.
“In faith, we together hold the conviction that justification is the work of the triune God. The Father sent his Son into the world to save sinners. The foundation and presupposition of justification is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Justification thus means that Christ himself is our righteousness, in which we share through the Holy Spirit in accord with the will of the Father. Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.
When Catholics say that persons “cooperate” in preparing for and accepting justification by consenting to God’s justifying action, they see such personal consent as itself an effect of grace, not as an action arising from innate human abilities.
While Catholic teaching emphasizes the renewal of life by justifying grace, this renewal in faith, hope, and love is always dependent on God’s unfathomable grace and contributes nothing to justification about which one could boast before God
Catholics can share the concern of the Reformers to ground faith in the objective reality of Christ’s promise, to look away from one’s own experience, and to trust in Christ’s forgiving word alone
When Catholics affirm the “meritorious” character of good works, their intention is to emphasize the responsibility of persons for their actions, not to contest the character of those works as gifts, or far less to deny that justification always remains the unmerited gift of grace.
Both Lutherans and Catholics alike recognized that “grace alone” saves. Grace is a gift from God, therefore salvation is a gift from God. The remaining difference is due to an emphasis on infused vs. imputed righteousness, but as the joint statement affirms, by whatever mechanics righteousness is made evident in the believers life, Christ is the source. The Catholics do not, as countless modern Protestants have accused them of, hold a doctrine of salvation through works. “Their” tradition formally condemned that in the 5th century.
The remaining distinctions do not cease to matter, and earnest Christians would do well to rightly parse heterodoxy from orthodoxy, but we must do it precisely, and with “Love” which might include doing justice to the actual doctrines, not a caricatured form of them. An interesting theory to ponder: might there be equally reactionary forces repulsing Catholics and Protestants away from each other? Much of what Protestants would point out as “decadent tradition adding on the gospel” became dogma after the reformation (Infallibility of the Pope and Immaculate Conception were formally dogmatized in the 19th century during Vatican I). And if the spirit of the G3 articles says anything, much of the modernizing of historic, Reformed Protestantism might be to create liturgical distance between anything that might be associated with “Catholic.”
The Important Questions the Reformers asked are always relevant, and a healthy Christian people would do well to seriously wrestle with them:
What is the nature of God
What is the nature of man?
What does a proper church/liturgy look like?
What is the church’s role in interpreting Scripture / Canon?
What exactly is Christ instituting in the Eucharist / Lord’s Supper?
What role does The Magnificat have within Christian theology?
It was not the desire of the first reformers to fuel the fires of post-renaissance individualism, but the fragmentation of the once “catholic” church began a spiral of confusion, disunity; and perpetuated schismatic isolation to the point where Christendom now boasts 45,000 denominations. It is remarkably fitting that the Enlightenment was already in the works. A generation of individual Bible-readers (under no authority but their own deceitful hearts) was already being prepared. Christ’s spirit, one of unity, was severed from the head due to ‘irreconcilable differences.’
Chesterton reminds us clearly of the foolishness of tearing down fences before we know why they were built. Many reformed churches today tore down the hard-won, laboriously built fences of the Catholic church in a zealous blaze of fury. When their own church had strayed from the gospel, become divided over heresies, and plunged into theological modernism, they rebuilt the fences of the bygone ‘catholic’ era. In recent history, the PC (USA) split to form the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America. These splits were due to the recognition of prudent men that there was a profound inability of the present Presbyterian church authority to hold fast to rudimentary teaching. If the church was truly to be an authority, a renewed emphasis on tradition was needed (but one based on the Reformers, not Rome).
This is why a solid Presbyterian is capable of seeing at once the virtues of Roman Catholic tradition, for, upon close inspection, they recognize that many of the fences built up in Rome look quite similar to the ones in their own Presbytery. The Recognition that Creeds and Confessions did not conjure from thin air, and their important role in preserving Biblical integrity is seeing a bit of a revival. This is not to say that Rome has not often clouded the gospel with fences, nor to say that many reformed churches have not failed to uphold the significance of the church, but it is to ask, what forces are now at play against every Christian in this technological-postmodern landscape, and what is THE CHURCH to do? To return again to Carl Trueman:
The most influential parachurches are run like businesses, money and marketing will be the overriding concerns, even as concern for ‘the gospel’ is always the gloss. Reinforced by a carrot-and-stick system of feudal patronage connected to lucrative conference gigs, publishing deals, and access to publicity, such tactics as those described will continue to be deployed. Roman Catholics might look on Protestantism from the outside and see it as theology ruled by a mob. Speaking as an insider, it often seems to me to be ruled more by the Mob.
And so it seems, that the main qualm with Protestantism may not be over any particular Protestant doctrine, as it is with a lack of any coherent “Doctrine” at all. What church may be solid one year, is only a charismatic speaker, a YouTube video, or a book away from seeing half its flock fashion itself an idol. The challenge is surely felt by all, and the lack of Medieval mass media, made it so that we can not definitively ask ‘What would Luther think?’ But the question persists.
We may not figure it out on this side of heaven, but until then, Let us pray. Let our hearts burn with The Word, and let us recover the theological heritage of greater men.
