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Evangelicals and Catholics together - the debate
April 23, 2005
The current debate regarding Evangelicals and Catholics together rages on in the blogosphere. I have never seen such acrimony, kindness, hate and love. Having not grown up Catholic but married to a former Catholic I realize my view of Roman Catholicism is colored by a very small slice of life. I've come to know and love former pre-Vatican II Catholics, post-Vatican II Catholics (my husband is one), Ameri-Catholics, Cafeteria Catholics and every other type of Catholic under the sun. They all bring unique perspectives on Catholicism that are sometimes no more similar than broccoli is to strawberries, (both having their merits).
Rather than rehashing something I know little of let me point you to a post and its COMMENTS (comments here are even better than the original post) . I don't know how to link directly to comments within a post so forgive me for copying large parts of certain well expressed thoughts. One is from a sincere Catholic sister responding to the Protestant backlash she has been experiencing on pro-life, Protestant blogs. First the post:
David Bayly writes in Out of our minds, too: The Beam in Our Own Eye....:
If we are honest, we must admit as Protestants that what the Reformers viewed, to a man, as the baseline defective principle of Roman Catholicism is so entrenched within Protestantism we are blind to it. Typical Protestant and Evangelical theology is little better than Roman Catholic. Theology which makes the human will sovereign in salvation is Roman, no matter where it is taught.
The reason so many Protestants have so easily and happily made the transition to Rome in recent years is that Protestant soteriology has devolved, in many cases, to Roman soteriology. We have thrown in the towel on the bondage of the will, on depravity, on the sovereign grace of God.,,,read the whole thing.
Tess a Catholic believer comments:
I know I said I didn't want to get into theology, but I have to ask this question. Sorry if it annoys you :(...
"Theology which makes the human will sovereign in salvation is Roman..."
As a Catholic I don't feel as if my will is sovereign _at all_. I'm so finite and wretched, just a dust mote in God's Creation. How could my will be sovereign compared to Our Lord's will and the firey love of the Holy Spirit? At the center of everything is Jesus Christ, radiating out His Divine love and mercy. My greatest hope is to die to my own self and be filled to the brim by God, so that in every action performed I do His will. Even if it breaks my human body, so be it, as long I am His little child.
What you say about Catholicism, and what I experience are so different that I don't understand. I just want to love Jesus. In a way I don't care about all the "theology", I just want to see the face of my Lord and worship Him forever. Even if He sent me to Hell, I would still love Him.
David (the blogging PCA pastor of Baylyblog) replies:
Dear Tess,
Let me say to you as a pastor that I am not seeking--nor I believe is anyone else on this blog--to cause you to question your justification. I don't have total recollection of all you've said on this blog, but my impression is that you have given strong evidence (as far as fruit is discernible on a blog) of regeneration both through your profession of faith and by your gentle and kind conduct here in our midst.
I think I speak for almost every writer on this blog when I say that I am confident there are true men and women of faith, thus regenerate Christians, within the Roman Catholic church.
No Protestant writing here has any desire to attack you personally in your faithful walk with God. Our desire is to rejoice with you in salvation through the blood of Christ, appropriated by faith, the fruit of which is works, entirely and together by the sovereign grace of God.
Yet to one convinced of Roman Catholic theology, our criticisms of Roman Catholicism, and particularly of Roman Catholic soteriology (doctrine concerning salvation), will inevitably appear personal.
Some years ago, out of personal respect for a number of the Evangelical leaders involved in formulating the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement, I told my associate pastor that I thought I could sign on to the statement. I had not thought much about the actual statement; just a casual read and a nod of agreement at the time.
But Gary, my associate, normally a gentle giant of a man, got as angry at me as I've ever seen him. Why? Because he grew up in a Roman Catholic church, attended Roman Catholic school, considered the Roman Catholic priesthood, all without ever hearing the true Gospel. He had only heard the sacerdotal, sacramental, works-based theology of the typical Roman Catholic church--and, I must add, of Trent--before coming to salvation in a Protestant church as a young man.
Tess, any teaching which denies God's truth and leads men astray we must oppose and seek to expose. Thus, you will find on this blog that, unlike Roman Catholic writers who must defend Roman Catholicism lock, stock and barrel because of Roman ecclesiology, when necessary, we are equally critical of Protestant churches.
We don't claim that all of Protestantism is better than all of Roman Catholicism, unlike the Roman Catholic apologists here. We claim that God's Church, while visible, is defined ultimately in God's eye by its invisible qualities. We don't deny the visible nature of the Church. We celebrate it. But we are very careful not to assume that the visible Church is precisely identical with the invisible Church. How to define that distinction requires more time than we have here, and perhaps more wisdom than I possess.
May I say gently in conclusion that experience can be true yet the assumptions we make based on our experience can be dead wrong. When I was in my teens, I once saw an oval set of lights hovering eerily in the sky. My initial assumption was that they were a UFO. It turned out they were the traveling lights and overhead destination sign of an old Greyhound bus coming slowly toward me over the brink of a hill.
I was probably subtly influenced toward thinking it was a UFO by a recent report from friends--two older couples I respected--that they were sure they had seen a UFO while driving one night.
You may truly have come to know the goodness of salvation in Christ. Your experience, therefore, would be true. But that does not necessarily make your assumptions about how you came to have that experience accurate. If people are telling you it came by mass, auricular confession, baptism, etc., you may believe them and be wrong--yet still have tasted the goodness of the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ.
Peace, friend. I trust I am...
Your brother in Christ,
David
Amen to it all. This is the type of sensitive conversation that needs to be taking place when discussing the essential doctrines of salvation and the visible church.
Again, I point you to Charles Hodge who addressed this same debate 150 years ago when defending himself against the charges that recognizing Roman Catholic baptism was not true baptism and a believer needs to re-baptized.
