Why I'm OK with being called "anti-catholic"

Listen: I ran into Justin Taylor's announcement of Francis Beckwith's new book of "road home" apologetics, and I posted a comment about as charitable as I could muster. However, let me admit something: there is nothing more distasteful to me than conventional pro-catholic apologetics, and, sadly, Dr. Beckwith participates in that -- he's nice about it, but that's what he does.

Honestly: I'm under Rome's anathema, and I'm OK with that. Their anathemas say more about them than anything I can say about them -- especially when it comes to stuff like how many books of the Bible I must accept and whether or not Mary was bodily assumed into heaven. Those anathemas speak to how stridently Rome applies the force of "anathema". When they anathematize me for believing in imputed righteousness and justification by faith alone, I respect them for admitting that they do not believe in a God who saves through Christ but a god who saves by rites, and I can walk away without any qualms.

Conventional pro-catholic apologetics try to sweep all that stuff under the rug, and that's what gets me.

Let me put it another way. 4 weeks ago, the boys on bikes came by and wanted to talk to me because I was out in the yard, and I gave them 30 minutes (I would have given them an hour, but they had a curfew). Their ploy was that they were just like any other Christian -- expect for that extra book they carry around, which was important to them -- authoritative to them -- but it's OK if I don't accept that.

yeah.

So they were in the neighborhood why? I mean: my town has 60 churches and 98% of these people are in church on Sunday. So are these guys evangelizing, or are they simply walking around? Because when we go on visitation, we're evangelizing -- we're seeking those who are either lost without Christ or lost without a church with which to fellowship.

And this is the thing: if the goal of Catholic apologetics is to get me into their mass and their sacraments because I'm under anathema and I'm denying what God has commanded so repent, let's talk about that. If the goal is to sweet-talk me by saying we aren't really very different, so try it, you might like it -- dude, forget it. I tried it, and I didn't like it. In fact, I hated it for its hypocrisy.

So am I "anti-catholic" in the sense that I am actually a Protestant? Why yes: I am. Deal with that and not the ridiculous idea that somehow I don't understand what it means to be under the anathema for believing Christ has actually saved me rather than think someday, after I have paid for my sins in Purgatory, Christ will have saved me.

I'll say it

I read this, thanks to alert reader Joel Griffith.

I'll say it here: this statement by the Pope is unintelligible. The words say something -- until you take them in the context of what words like "unity" mean in the Catechism and the formal teaching of Rome.

Nobody's going to like that, but that's where this discussion peters out. (heh).

Here's my brief thought: if the Pope is serious about dialog, let him repeal the anathemas of Trent -- not by inches, but as the result of a conciliar decree. Repeal the anathemas to prove that the happy talk in this announcement is serious. Then we can talk in a true spirit of ecumenical brotherhood.

Welcome to the Club, Tim Enloe

I even hesitate to link to this site as it brings out the worst in everyone involved, but as evidence that the term "anti-catholic" now means absolutely nothing at all, I welcome Tim Enloe to the ranks of anti-catholic protestant apologists.

HT: "mean" Gene Bridges

Sister Mary Viriginity

if you haven't seen this, you should go ahead and see what's cooking at the Catholic Church.

Those Franciscans sure have come a long way from the simple brothers ...

Beckwith Link

Francis Beckwith answers some more questions. His treatment of the Council of Trent here is interesting only in that it demonstrates how little he had to do to return to communion with Rome.

If we assume for a minute that he's right about the sixth session of Trent, and that only "uncharitable" "Bible church" bigots would represent it as saying something other than sola Fide/sola Gratia/solo Christo, how does he explain the great Protestant confessions and catechisms rejecting the decrees of Trent on this matter?

Seriously: was Trent speaking to no one? Were they randomly picking doctrines to affirm in order to simply pass the time? Was no one intended by the canons XVII and XVIII in session 6?

May God be with him. His choice now is as hollow as his choice to leave was 30 years ago.

Wait for the book

Francis Beckwith has apparently resigned from ETS as a result of his recommitment to Roman Catholicism.

While many notable men have chimed in on this matter, my guess is that there's going to be a book eventually. I'll wait for the book before I comment.

No: you can't make me comment on it. There's not any substantive information available except that this is a done deal and Dr. Beckwith recognizes that it's not a small matter. After that, the speculation is useless.

actual catholicism

this is how one actually becomes a Catholic. For the record. The rest of the loose talk you might read about this is just flapping lips.

Family Resemblance [3]

Well, alert reader “Kaffinator” gave us a head’s up in the meta of the last post, wondering if we can call Muslims and Jews “Liars” because, based on Acts 17, they are merely acting in ignorance. I responded to him there, but let me make something clear: this isn’t about calling Muslims or Jews “liars”. This is about whether we can call them family, and whether they can recognize the Father without recognizing the Son. And most importantly, if someone does do this, what have those people done explicitly to the Jews and Muslims if they say the Father can be recognized without recognizing the Son.

What we’re really concerned about, in the end, is the Catholic Catechism, particularly the passage which we have previously seen:

839 "Those who have not yet received the Gospel are related to the People of God in various ways."
The relationship of the Church with the Jewish People. When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People, "the first to hear the Word of God." The Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God's revelation in the Old Covenant. To the Jews "belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ", "for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable."

840 and when one considers the future, God's People of the Old Covenant and the new People of God tend towards similar goals: expectation of the coming (or the return) of the Messiah. But one awaits the return of the Messiah who died and rose from the dead and is recognized as Lord and Son of God; the other awaits the coming of a Messiah, whose features remain hidden till the end of time; and the latter waiting is accompanied by the drama of not knowing or of misunderstanding Christ Jesus.

In these two paragraphs, something interesting happens: the admission that those who maintain the Jewish faith have not received the Gospel (they are “Those who have not yet received the Gospel”, yes?) is very quickly translated into those who have a viable understanding of the Messiah. Somehow, “the drama of not knowing or of misunderstanding Christ Jesus” is equated with the Christian hope of the return of the risen Christ as Lord – equated not as identical, but as “similar”, which this paragraph implies (let’s admit it doesn’t come out and say this explicitly) is enough to save them.

That’s interesting in light of 1 John 2’s explicit statements that the only way to know God and to have eternal life is to confess the Son. And what is certain is that Jews do not confess the Son but deny the Son.

I had a team of reasonable people review this essay before posting it, and while none of them are theologians, all of them are reliable people. The common concern they had about the first working draft was that my point about what has happened here is unclear, or esoteric. Let me make it as boldly as possible at this point.

What has not happened in this place is that the CCC has denied that Rome recognizes the savior: what has happened is that Rome has allowed that the Jews, who do not recognize the Messiah, these men do not deny the Father: they simply know Him in another way -- what they say is perhaps an older way, as it is the "Old Covenant" way.

That's the hinge of the problem here: it is not the confession, "I do not need Christ to know God" which is defaming John's letter: it is the confession, "You do not need Christ to know God," or "they do not need Christ to know God" that stands against what John wrote in his first letter.

The CCC continues:

841 The Church's relationship with the Muslims. "The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day."

Now, think on that: The Koran explicitly denies that Jesus is the Son of God. Sura 4:157, 4:171, 5:74, 6:101 and 19:90 all explicitly deny the relationship of Jesus to the Father. But here the CCC says that because they make the claim that they worship the God of Abraham, they are included in the plan of salvation.

Consider it: the CCC is not affirming that Jesus Christ is not the Son of God. There’s no question that it does affirm that Jesus is the only Son of the Father. But what it promulgates here is the idea that God the Father can be seen apart from Christ, and in spite of openly denying Christ. When John says (as we reviewed last time), "No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also", John has provided a scriptural litmus test for how the Father can be known, and how the Father is actually known. And he classifies the statement that Jesus is not "Christ" a "lie".

Listen: the matter is not "is Jesus Christ for me?" The matter is whether Jesus is Christ for all men. If I have Jesus as Christ, and you have Moses as Christ, and this other guy has a man named Tom Cruise as Christ, and another fellow has a fellow named Mohammed as Christ, and I say to all of them, "those are all ways of coming to know the Father," I have lied to them. The only way to know the Father is by the Son -- and if you reject the Son, you have rejected the Father.

Anything else, says John, is a lie. There's no family resemblance between the Gospel and Islam; there's no family resemblance between modern Judaism and the Gospel. To say that these in some way reflect the truth about God in spite of their open rejection of Christ is a false hope, a false witness to the uniqueness of Jesus.

This is what fulfills the criteria Kaffinator was so generous to highlight for us. That is, John’s warning here is against those who deny that the Son proclaim a lie – and these paragraphs do exactly that to the Muslim and the Jew: these passages demonstrate a clear affirmation that those who deny Christ have a part in eternal life.

“Now cent,” comes the reasonable objector, “you haven’t finished up here. The next 7 paragraphs expound deftly on the matter of ignorance rather than base rejection. You need to be fair about that these other paragraphs say before you can get this monkey here to dance.”

On the one hand, I think that objection looks past the ways the CCC expresses itself in the previous paragraphs – because it doesn’t say that “ignorant” Jew or the “confused” Muslim: it says “the Jews” and “the Muslims”. But I’d also say that objection is exactly right – the rest is crucial to whether or not what I have just said is true or false:

842 The Church's bond with non-Christian religions is in the first place the common origin and end of the human race:
All nations form but one community. This is so because all stem from the one stock which God created to people the entire earth, and also because all share a common destiny, namely God. His providence, evident goodness, and saving designs extend to all against the day when the elect are gathered together in the holy city. . .

843 The Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near since he gives life and breath and all things and wants all men to be saved. Thus, the Church considers all goodness and truth found in these religions as "a preparation for the Gospel and given by him who enlightens all men that they may at length have life."

In this passage, the CCC says that all religions prepare men for God. That is, in Islam, Allah who never offers a savior is preparing men to receive God. In the underlying document to these brief paragraphs, (Nostrum Aetate) the notion of Buddhists attaining higher knowledge of their own accord or by a higher power is seen as a “holy truth”. It is a plain statement of Christless access to the Father, which John has already deemed a “lie”.

And that's the problem I want to big home here: the question is not whether the Roman Magisterium has simply affirmed something which is philosophical or extra-biblical: it is that they have affirmed something to men which is a lie that turns them away from the promise of everlasting life.

844 In their religious behavior, however, men also display the limits and errors that disfigure the image of God in them:

Very often, deceived by the Evil One, men have become vain in their reasonings, and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and served the creature rather than the Creator. Or else, living and dying in this world without God, they are exposed to ultimate despair.

845 To reunite all his children, scattered and led astray by sin, the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son's Church. the Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation. the Church is "the world reconciled." She is that bark which "in the full sail of the Lord's cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world." According to another image dear to the Church Fathers, she is prefigured by Noah's ark, which alone saves from the flood.

We are about to tip into the key affirmation of this passage, but before we do, think about this explanation which is leaned up against Romans 1 in order to prop it up. What is at stake here is whether men can have the Father, and accept the Father, unless they accept the Son. Yet here the Son is not mentioned as the Ultimate matter: the church is. That is: what gets substituted for the Son – that to deny the Son is to deny the Father – is the church as the ultimate expression of salvation.

In fact, that’s what they say in the very next part:

"Outside the Church there is no salvation"

846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:

Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.

Gosh! It’s not the denial of Christ which makes one not able to be saved: It’s the denial of the church which makes one not able to be saved. It’s not even subtle.

And think on that: the hope they are extending to all men here is that if they are Muslim, but they allow that the Roman church offers salvation, they are fine Muslims - they have a part in the plan of salvation. But if they are Muslims which deny that the Roman church offers anything to men, they are hell-bound -- can not be saved.

847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.

848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men.”

What we come upon here is a complete inversion of what 1 John 2 affirmed: it is not that we come to the Church by confessing Christ: we come to Christ by confessing (as well as we can – some of us have the impediments of ignorance and innocence) the church.

What concerns me most about this, in spite of my protests when we started, is the implications to FV and the relationship FV says we ought to have toward the Catholics church based on the objective nature of baptism. See: it seems to me that the RCC here makes a pretty complicated denial of Christ in key respects – a denial of confessing Christ as necessary for the Jew and the Muslim, among others. And because FV is a highly-nuanced system of theology, they ought to be careful regarding the nuances of others which they overlook.

Foundational to the FV position of objective baptism is that the baptism administered has to be a baptism in the Trinitarian form -- and affirmation of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Athanasian sense. But it seems that the Athanasian sense of who Christ is to all men is, in these passages, overturned -- He may be a good way, or the best way, but He is not the only way to the Father in the CCC. That's a serious charge, and a serious problem in the light of 1 John 2.

Doesn’t John’s definition of denying the identity of God point directly at this writing and say something about whether those who advance it are Trinitarians? Isn’t the inspired definition of acknowledging God’s identity here pointing us to a fraudulent teacher?

Listen: you don’t have to point me to the dozens of places where the Father, Son and Spirit are listed as co-equal in the Godhead in all the Vatican publications. The problem – and the challenge – is to justify the violation of the Trinitarian definition John gives us made by the CCC in these paragraphs.

Please: be with the Lord’s people in the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day this weekend. You need it. It’s been a long week.

Family Resemblance [2]

So we are going to approach this matter with the assumption that a person has the ability to read Scripture and understand it, and that a necessary attribute of Scripture is, as it says in Deu 6, that it produces an effect like this: “It is the LORD your God you shall fear.” This is, you can know God, and know what He has commanded, and know something about Him through His word.

And that’s not really very controversial – any decent Catholic will tell you that you ought to read Scripture. They agree that it is useful for Spiritual formation – it is in fact listed as necessary for the right formation of conscience by the CCC. The question is: what do you do with what you read there?

While I have used Deu 6 as a jumping-off place to sort of position the rest of this discussion, my main text for this meditation or series or whatever you want to call it is actually in 1 John 2:

I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?

There’s more to my passage here, but let’s think about that for a second: John says here explicitly that anyone who denies that Jesus is the Christ -- that is, the Messiah, -- is a liar. That’s a pretty specific category to think about: those who deny the Christ-ness of Jesus are not speaking about the truth, but are speaking a lie. And what’s even more interesting is what kind of lie John calls this:

This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made to us--eternal life.

It’s not just a lie which you can just ignore or whitewash: it’s a lie which denies the Father -- a lie which makes one antichrist and places one outside of eternal life.

See: John here, in a few short sentences, defines the right way to see God. One must see the Father through the Son in order to see the Father at all. It’s not a matter of degrees. It’s not a matter of general revelation. It’s a matter of whether or not one denies the Father when one speaks of Christ.

And it’s not even just a matter of whether you “deny” the Father, but a matter of whether, as John continues, you will receive eternal life. If you are in Christ, you have God’s promise of eternal life; if you are not in Christ, you are not given that promise.

Those who deny Christ are liars, John says – the kind of liars which are not given a certain promise of salvation, but denied the promise of salvation. It’s a goats-and-sheep dichotomy; it’s frankly left or right. There’s no fence left to sit on in John’s theology. And it hinges on the identity of the son relative to the Father.

So as we go to review the section of the CCC in the next post, think about that: John is clear that denying Christ is not an act of ignorance but an act of deceit or lying – and doing it denies the identity of God the Father. You can’t be talking about the Father unless you accept the Son.

This is the Scripture’s view of how unique and necessary Christ is. Think about that as we move to compare it to something else.

Family Resemblance [1]

Ciao il Lazio Italia! Benvenuto!

You know: so what? A week ago, I was complaining that internet apologetics leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it’s like a sandwich with only condiment, or maybe it’s a sandwich which is all meat and no bread or veggies – it’s half the work, half the example we need to give and therefore not really all that great.

So now I jump in with both feet to internet apologetics focused on a group which is high-profile, and who already holds me in ill-repute, having been banned by Envoy forums and having been placed in Dave Armstrong’s Museum of Anti-Catholic villainy for pointing out to him that the term “anti-Catholic” is a term which denotes sociological bigotry and not merely Protestant dissent and rejection of Rome as a valid church. How’s that not going to leave the same bad taste – especially given the topic which can be rightly rebutted by the avid Catholic advocate, “dude: Rome never once openly rejects the Trinity. You’re full of it”?

Here’s why this is important: this discussion goes directly to the matter of where authority comes from. That’s the top-of-mind issue today for many non-Catholics who look at Rome and ask ahistorical, acontextual questions like, “if I were in church 1500 years ago, where would I be?” It seems to them that because some questions were not (and perhaps could not be) asked until about the 14th century, that Rome is itself a long-standing authority, a long-standing institution, and must therefore have something which (for example) Zwingli-ist Baptists don’t.

That concern gets raised to the highest levels when, for example, the question of whither the Bible is raised. I mean: isn’t the trump card of Catholic apologetics the affirmation that the church assembled and then ultimately canonized the Scriptures, thereby making the Bible a function of Magisterial authority and the right-minded office of the church to teach what God has ordained? I mean: how’s a Baptist supposed to overcome that example – with the Trail of Blood? It seems like it’s the end of the line for any Protestant when it comes down to authority – it’s some kind of unanswerable question. At least, that’s how those who turn up in Catholic apologetics frame it – nobody could answer my questions about authority and why it seems Protestants don’t have any, so I had to follow my conscience to Rome.

So there’s this problem that seems ridiculously common – people who are not Catholics find themselves faced with the most basic claims of Catholicism, and they don’t have any answers. And in the lack of answers, they think they have a logical or spiritual obligation to do what the guy who says he has authority tells him to do.

Well: OK. So where do we start, especially using the ground rules which we have adopted from Dr. Piper’s DGM? I’d like to start at a place where we can talk about Scripture – and one passage of Scripture in particular – in the way which Scripture presents itself.

So, for example, when Scripture says something like this: ):

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

And when the LORD your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you--with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant--and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. It is the LORD your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear. You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you, for the LORD your God in your midst is a jealous God, lest the anger of the LORD your God be kindled against you, and he destroy you from off the face of the earth.

We can read this and even though it is a somewhat difficult text we can get something out of it which is meaningful.

Let me be somewhat bold about something: the average Catholic and the average Baptist have the same basic problem – that is, there’s nobody reading the Bible to them and telling them what it means. There’s a lot of chatter elsewhere in the bandwidth about the “liturgical” context of Scripture and how that’s the proper basis for developing a hermeneutic, but frankly that idea has the massive problem that not one of the books of the NT was written for the primary purpose of being read during the liturgy. And even if that objection can be overcome, this view of Scripture has the problem of reconciling passages like Deu 6 or Psa 119 which both imply and demand that people read, memorize, and consider the Scripture at all times and not compartmentalize Scripture to some liturgical event.

But in that, the problem that people do not have someone educating them about the Scripture is rather large. For the Protestant, it’s large because that’s a rather central part of the reason we are not Catholics, historically. Sola Scriptura was (and is) a precept which says, in effect, that man does not live by bread alone (speaking of liturgical implications) but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. We should have more concern about what Scripture does say so that when someone comes around with something Scripture doesn’t say, we can at least post-up the first line of defense against error.

For the Catholic, this problem is large because it’s what the Magisterium is allegedly supposed to be doing. If we lay aside (for the moment) the issue of whether the Magisterium is itself the mouth of God, there’s this huge book God has given for the equipping of the faithful, and it appears that Rome doesn’t have any authoritative affirmations about that book. For example, there’s Genesis 1 and the matter of Creation. Without any question, the Catholic affirms – every Sunday – that God created the Heavens and the Earth, right? We believe in one God, the Father, creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen. But can the Catholic read Genesis 1 and say, “The church has taught me, without any room to doubt it, that Genesis 1 is about the creation of the world by God”?

The answer is “no”. There are no infallible teachings to that matter – so the Catholic may read Genesis 1, and may, by his own power and learning, come to the conclusion that Gen 1 is about how God created the Heavens and the Earth, but that’s not an infallible belief: that’s a fallible belief. A homily this Sunday doesn’t fix that, either: only the Magisterium or the Pope may address the issue infallibly, and if they don’t, the Catholic has to muddle through as best he can until they do.

And I say that to say this: the authority problem cuts both ways, if it makes a cut at all. If it is required that there is some human person who can clear a matter up by means of his position or office, the Protestant is somewhat hung as he is without such a fellow, and the Catholic seems to have a guy who might have such an office but refuses to use it in that way.

So the question of human authority cannot decide for us what a passages of Scripture says. But it also seems, as we look at Deu 6 or Psa 119, that this question is not in the mind of the writers of Scripture. They escape the question by framing the matter in a significantly-different way.

You know – Deu 6 says what is says (above). Think about that: God is here issuing the Mosaic law, with its priesthood and its sacrifices, and the command to all of Israel is not, “and since I tell the priests special things, listen to them first”, but “these words that I command you today shall be on your heart”. Use all manner of means to never forget them – because in the good times ahead, you will be prone to forget them and turn away from me, God your Savior.

See: it is God’s word which the faithful must cling to – not God’s word interpreted, but what God said. God’s word is what will keep one from turning to idols and abandoning God. And what’s at stake here is whether you will do it for you.

So as we turn to Scripture, and then one group’s affirmation about who God is and how He relates to people, let’s remember that Scripture is given to us for our sake. It glorifies God, and proclaims what He has said, and while it does many things greatly, it instructs us about who God is and how we will know Him.

Anyone who wants to take that off the table is trying to take something precious away from you. If you want them to do that, I can’t stop you. I can only tell you it’s a bad idea.