Category Archives: Roman Catholicism

Culture News: D.C.-Area Bishops To Enforce Communion Ban On Sebelius

Well, I cannot say that this is not relevant to our nations current historical setting. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is going to be a very important moment in the coming culture shift that grows stronger every day that newly appointed secularists and anti-Christs are confirmed into the Government’s leading ranks.

Here is the news story from The Bulletin:

Two Washington, D.C.-area Catholic bishops have instructed Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, D-Kan., President Barack Obama’s pick to Be Secretary Of Health and Human Services, to refrain from receiving Holy Communion on account of her stances on human-life issues such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research.

This comes as Ms. Sebelius undergoes Senate confirmation hearings before the Committee on on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

In May 2008, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kan. told Ms. Sebelius that she should not present herself to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion. Last week, Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C. and Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Va., both said that they would enforce Archbishop Naumann’s orders while Ms. Sebelius is in their respective dioceses.

Ms. Sebelius ran afoul of Catholic leaders for her strident support of abortion. She has been connected with late-term abortionist Geroge Tiller, who was found not guilty of violating Kansas’ late-term abortion laws at a trial earlier this week. Dr. Tiller still faces an investigation that could strip him of his medical license.

Ms. Sebelius was asked to refrain from the Eucharist in accordance with Canon 915 of the Catholic Code of Canon Law. According to that Canon, “those upon whom the penalty of excommunication or interdict has been imposed or declared, and others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”

[HT: In Light of the Gospel]

Trevin Wax Interview with N.T. Wright

Here is the full transcript of the interview Trevin conducted with N.T. Wright. This is a really great interview and I hope that every one of you will read through it or listen to the mp3 of it. The mp3 is available for direct download here.

I really appreciated Wright’s response and comments regarding his critics, in particular John Piper. Here is what Wright had to say about Piper and his new book:

Piper is in a different category. He graciously sent me an advance manuscript of his book which is critiquing me and invited my comments on it. I sent him a lengthy set of comments. I’ve only just got on email about two days ago the book in the revised form and I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. So I cannot say whether he’s being fair or not at this stage.

But I do know that he has done his darndest to be fair and I honor that and I respect that. People have asked me if I’m going to write a response, and the answer is that I don’t know. I’m kind of busy right now. But I maybe should, sooner or later.

I would love to see that response! Pray that Wright will find the time to respond and that this Piper/Wright dialogue will continue to bear fruit for God’s Kingdom.

The breakdown of the interview is also available in individual postings. Here is the breakdown:

  1. Introduction
  2. Wright’s conversion, calling, and personal worship
  3. Wright on “the gospel”
  4. Justification by faith
  5. Justification – present and future
  6. Justification and the Roman Catholic Church
  7. Sola Scriptura
  8. Is Wright arrogant to assume he has just now figured out what Paul meant?
  9. Wright on his critics
  10. Justification in practice
  11. Wright on penal substitution
  12. Wright on the resurrection
  13. Wright on Evangelism
  14. Wright on Church and State
  15. Upcoming Writings and Conclusion

Q&A: Francis Beckwith

Here is an update on the Francis Beckwith news: Former ETS president speaks about what he takes from evangelicalism back to the Roman Catholic Church.

Beckwith recently announced his reversion back to the RC church. It truly is a sad event. May God, in some way, use him to change the Roman church, but it is my fear that he will simply be another defender of the heretical views of the historic RC church.

In Christ and In Defense of the Faith,

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Francis Beckwith resigned on May 5 as president of the Evangelical Theological Society. One week earlier the Baylor University philosophy professor rejoined the Roman Catholic Church, his home until age 14. He spoke with Christianity Today editor David Neff about reaction to his decision, theological misconceptions, and evangelical strengths and weaknesses.

What good things from the evangelical community will you take back with you to Roman Catholicism?

A number of things. First, I think of the evangelical emphasis on the importance of Scripture. Much of what I see in the Catholic Church is formed by my evangelical experience. When I recite, for instance, the Apostles’ Creed, I think it’s more of a cognitive experience for me than with people who have been Catholic for some time. Emphasis on the written word comes from my evangelical background—that is, when I read these things, I’m really interested in what the text is saying, not just the mystical part, which is certainly also appropriate. For instance, after reading the Apostles’ Creed, I turned to my wife and I said, “You know, there are only two proper names in the creed—Pontius Pilate and Virgin Mary. I don’t know if anyone’s ever noticed that.”

I still consider myself an evangelical, but no longer a Protestant. I do think I have a better understanding of what sometimes the Catholic Church is trying to convey. Protestants often misunderstand. The issue of justification was key for me. The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue—not because virtue saves you, but because that’s the way God’s grace gets manifested. As an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn’t have a good enough incentive to do so. Now there’s a kind of theological framework, and it doesn’t say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something. It’s important to allow the grace of God to be exercised through your actions. The evangelical emphasis on the moral life forms my Catholic practice with an added incentive. That was liberating to me.

Some of the people who have been critical say, “You’ve gone into the oppressive works system of Catholicism.” That’s not the way I look at it at all. I look at it as a chance to do good. My own work apart from God’s grace doesn’t matter for my salvation; what matters is the sort of person I become by allowing God’s grace to work through my obeying his commandments and taking the sacraments. Unfortunately, the view of justification is sometimes presented clumsily by some Catholic laypeople.

What can an evangelical learn from the great tradition without giving up the genius of evangelicalism?

Much of Christian theology that we assume to be true, key doctrines such as the Trinity and the deity of Christ, were thought out quite a while ago through rigorous arguments and analysis and debate. Evangelicals kid themselves when they believe that they can re-invent the wheel with every generation, that you have to produce another spate of systematic theology textbooks to teach people the stuff that has already been articulated for generations. Not to say those things aren’t important. They are, and obviously you have to write these things depending upon the historical context. However, I do think we have to admit that the way that we read Scripture is through the ideas and concepts that have been passed down to us by a great tradition.

Look, you’re not going to come up with the Nicene Creed by just picking up the Bible. Does the Bible contribute to our understanding? Absolutely it does; the Nicene Creed is consistent with Scripture. But you needed a church that had a self-understanding in order to articulate that in any clear way. I am not saying that necessarily means that you have to be a Catholic. But we have to understand that the Reformation only makes sense against the backdrop of a tradition that was already there. Calvin and Luther did not go back and re-write Nicea. They took it for granted. There’s nothing wrong with conceding that and celebrating it and reading those authors.

Looking at tradition would also help evangelicals learn about Christian liturgical traditions, like Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, that many evangelicals reject because they say liturgy is unbiblical. When did these practices come to be? It turns out many of them came to be very early on in church history when people were close historically to the apostles themselves. There must be something to these practices that the early Christians thought was perfectly consistent with what they had received from the apostles.

And I think that would do a couple of things. It would turn down the volume of the rhetoric from evangelicals, at least free-church Protestants. They would understand this goes back a long way. That may not convince them that it is right, but at least it would show them that it was widely held and that Christians who were right there on top of the early church practiced them. That was quite liberating for me, when I became aware of the writings of some of the church fathers and especially the liturgical aspects. Some of the folks who have read my blog post on my return to the church have misunderstood my reading of the church fathers. They think I went back and tried to find theology, and that really wasn’t it for me. It was the practices of the church that were more important. I did some research years ago on the relationship of Greek philosophy and the Christian doctrine of God, and that was very helpful. But that’s when I first began reading the fathers. One finds the practice of penance very early on during the times in which Christians were being persecuted. Some of the Christians who had denied their faith had to publicly repent for their sins and suffer penance. This was considered to be perfectly consistent with a doctrine of faith.

Were you surprised by the number and strength of the reactions you received?

Yes, I’m shocked. What it did to me, though, was create a sense of humility that I don’t think I ever had before my entire life. I felt a sense of responsibility that had been placed on me by God to conduct myself in a way that was neither scandalous to the Catholic Church nor the evangelical world. This is a unique opportunity, and I don’t know where it is going to go from here. But it is a unique opportunity to be able to engage both my Catholic friends and my Protestant friends in a way that we can have mutual understanding and maybe move toward some sort of Christian unity, even if it’s not ecclesiastical.

The number of e-mails that I have received and the number of comments on websites—I would have never predicted it. I think I underestimated the deep divisions that were still there, at least among lay evangelicals and Catholics more so than the academics who interact with each other more often. Non-denominational Bible church folks are still reading stuff about Catholicism published in the 1950s. Evangelicals have a responsibility to educate their people on this. And I think Catholics, as well, have an obligation to set the record straight about evangelicalism.

Evangelicals and Catholics Together made a helpful statement on justification some years ago and received lots of criticism.

Yeah, that was something else. The book that was very helpful to me was Mark Noll’s Is the Reformation Over? That’s what led me to read the Joint Declaration on Justification. Then I began reading some Catholic authors who did a very nice job with explaining the Catholic views of grace and faith. I thought to myself, How come every evangelical book that I’ve read on Catholicism didn’t get this right? Part of it is a paradigm problem. I don’t think it’s duplicity. I just think if you hold to a highly cognitive, almost legal model of justification, there is no component for God’s grace working out salvation within you.

You’re best known for your skill at thinking and argumentation. How do you see the less-rational instincts functioning in the Christian life?

That’s a great question. I think there are two extremes in the evangelical world, both of which are based on the same premise. They both accept the same premise that the Enlightenment view of reason is the correct view of reason. And the problem is that the Emergent people say, “We reject the Enlightenment view of reason; therefore we reject reason.” And then the other guys say, “Well, that is the right view of reason.”

I think that they’re both wrong. Rationality or reason is much more expansive than that. There’s an intuitive element of reason, and it’s not simply the rationalistic calculation that one gets out of philosophers like Descartes.

For example, let me ask you, why do you love your wife? If you said, “She’s beautiful,” a typical rationalistic Christian would say, “But that’s not enough!”

You say, “Well, she’s smart.”

“That’s not enough!”

“But she loves me.”

“That’s not enough! Your mother loves you; you’re not going to marry her!”

Wait a second! It’s an organic thing. It’s no one of these things. It’s not that I take each one separately and add them up. But it’s part of a mosaic or a tapestry where all these things are tied together.

The debate over Sola Scriptura is big between Protestants and Catholics. A Catholic thinker will say, typically, “Sola Scriptura is not mentioned in the Bible.” And the Protestant will say, “It’s not mentioned in the Bible, but it’s implied there.” But even if it’s implied there, why should I accept it? Believers in the Qur’an believe Sola Scriptura. At some point, there has to be some connection between the church and its role and the phenomenon of Scripture. There are a lot of evangelicals who believe that and aren’t Catholic. But if you accept that particularly narrow view of Sola Scriptura, then it becomes almost impossible to understand the Catholic view. And I think it’s a kind of axiomatic rationalism that doesn’t really capture why people convert, and why people believe things.

In terms of Scripture and the church, there is both a triumphalist version (We’re the ones who canonized Scripture!) and there’s a humbler version, which says the church recognized the voice of the Spirit in Scripture and submitted itself to it.

Both could be true at the same time. To say that somehow the church decreed it is to take a voluntarist model of authority. That is what you often find in real strong Calvinist views of God’s moral nature, that things ought to be obeyed because God says so, not because he’s good. In a weird way, there’s an assumption that all authority is authoritarian. I deny that assumption. I think that the church was given the authority to make these judgments, and that the Holy Spirit allowed them to make those judgments and humbly accept it. So they’re not inconsistent with each other.

Related Elsewhere:

ETS Resignation Triggers Tradition Discussion” focused on the ETS’s reaction to Beckwith’s resignation.

Collin Hansen commented in CT Liveblog on Beckwith’s resignation and the following ETS statement.

Beckwith is a contributor to Right Reasons, a blog by conservative philosophers. His most recent post explains his decision.

Beckwith’s own blog has links to online essays he has written.

Other recent news articles include:

Prominent evangelical returns to Catholic roots | Baylor professor resigns as head of conservative intellectual group. (The Dallas Morning News)

Baylor prof Beckwith becomes Catholic, resigns as head of evangelical society | Renowned evangelical philosopher Francis Beckwith has become a Roman Catholic and, as a result, has resigned as president — and also as a member — of the Evangelical Theological Society. (Associated Baptist Press)