Calvinists Convert to Catholicism

[Mayflower]

Calvinists Convert to Catholicism

[video=youtube;ZXs67Edu_Yw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXs67Edu_Yw&feature=related[/video]

-----Added 12/19/2009 at 04:33:13 EST-----

See at 6.42 min !!!!!!

No Salvation Outside the Church

[video=youtube;A_Llvpj04mw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_Llvpj04mw&feature=related[/video]

 

[Christusregnat]

This gentleman doesn't seem to understand what the historic reformed faith is. Nor does he really seem to understand the Romish system. There are thousands of views within the Romish system as well.

 

[Wayne]

His cheap little bookshelves are warped, too.

Well, they are.

 

[Reformed Thomist]

I see a lot of people converting to Romanism from (often very) broadly within the Reformed tradition, usually cradle PC(USA)'ers poorly catechized; I don't see many serious Biblical Calvinists, with a good understanding of Reformed theology and historic evangelicalism and genuine appreciation of the history/tradition, swimming the Tiber.

Of course, it better serves Rome's purposes to pretend that all of these converts are of the latter category.

 

[blhowes]

I wonder what his take would be on "Why Catholics Convert to Calvinism"

 

[Paul Trask]

I was raised Roman Catholic and now a I a reformed Presbyterian. In our Church we have had three families convert from Romanism to become Presbyterian.

 

[Reformed Thomist]

I wonder what his take would be on "Why Catholics Convert to Calvinism"

Poor catechisis, no doubt!

 

[blhowes]

I was raised Roman Catholic and now a I a reformed Presbyterian. In our Church we have had three families convert from Romanism to become Presbyterian.

I'd imagine you were taught growing up much of what he spoke about regarding the authority of the catholic church, the pope, etc. Not to derail the thread, but it'd be interesting to hear what you and others went through resolving in your mind the authority issue.

 

[JDKetterman]

I had a friend who recently converted to Roman Catholicism. Him and his friends created a website called "Called to Communion."

 

[Bengibor]

what I find astounding with these converts is their lack of knowledge of the Reformed and truly catholic (not Roman-Catholic) doctrine. Many of them are so full of ignorance, some I know in person.
On the other hand when they talk about Reformed and Protestant faith they grossly misrepresent it first and then they criticize it heavily.
Misrepresentation and even open slander appear in more than 95% of debates about Calvinism by Roman and Eastern apologetics.

 

[PresbyDane]

If you watch the latest Luther movie you here Luthers comments to that "Nulla Ecclesiam non est salus" sentence.
It is part of some Roman church documents past down under the mock name "extravagate"
because apparently even the Roman church finds it embarresing.

Not to mention hat the hole thing comes from a misreading of scripture.

 

[Narnian]

I'd be happy to go back to the Roman church! All they have to do is repudiate the Council of Trent and the 4th Lateran council, repeal several dozen papal bulls, replace the Catholic Cathechism with the Westminster Cathechism, canonize Luther and Calvin, apologize for the 30 Years War and the St. Bartholomew's Day masacre, and several other things I can't think of at the moment.

I just finished teaching a Sunday School class on the history of the Reformation and a couple of the key points I made were:

1. The church'es history prior to the Reformation is Protestant history as well so there are no gaps.

2. It was the Roman church that broke off by going apostate - it is the Reformed tradition (and good Lutherans) who are carrying the true church foward.

 

[jogri17]

What defines the Reformed faith?

 

[yeutter]

What defines the Reformed faith?

The reformed faith is characterized by agreement with the five solas of the Reformation and covenantal [as opposed to dispensational] theology. An adherent to the reformed faith would be in general substantive agreement with the historic reformed creeds, such as the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.

-----Added 12/20/2009 at 09:07:50 EST-----

.... I don't see many serious Biblical Calvinists, with a good understanding of Reformed theology and historic evangelicalism and genuine appreciation of the history/tradition, swimming the Tiber.

You would be shocked at how many men who once appeared to be solidly grounded in the faith have swam the Tiber. Sad but true.

 

[Reformed Thomist]

.... I don't see many serious Biblical Calvinists, with a good understanding of Reformed theology and historic evangelicalism and genuine appreciation of the history/tradition, swimming the Tiber.

You would be shocked at how many men who once appeared to be solidly grounded in the faith have swam the Tiber. Sad but true.

I guess I'm still pretty new to the Reformed community. Anyway, I'm seriously tempted to commit the No True Scotsman fallacy.

 

[Theoretical]

I had a friend who recently converted to Roman Catholicism. Him and his friends created a website called "Called to Communion."

I too have had a friend recently convert from Reformed to Catholic, and Called to Communion played a huge role in convincing my friend of Catholic perspectives. It's a very well-targeted "ministry."

 

[dudley]

I agree with blhowes!

I wonder what his take would be on "Why Catholics Convert to Calvinism"

I agree with you and if you check out my posts 585 to date, many deal with my faith journey from Roman Catholicism to Reformed Protestant. I am an ex Roman Catholic who is now a stauch Reformed Protestant. If you like any of my posts and think it might be helpful I could also write to him if you wish to make contact. Or I can write on why I as a former Roman Catholic converted to Calvinism and Reformed Protestantism.

 

[johnbugay]

These guys are out there and they are aggressive. And they have a very "pretty" story -- authority going all the way back -- but when you look at the historical details of this, the story falls apart.

I've been interacting with Roman Catholics for a long time -- I believe that they best way to deal with their "stories" is to (a) have a clear understanding of the Gospel, and (b) challenge their "stories" with historical details. Pro-actively, if possible.

A great deal has been written about authority in the early church. Historically, it simply did not occur the way the individual in these videos talked about it.

Roman Catholics constantly build "anachronism" into their stories -- that is, they look at some instance of (their) church doctrine, and just simply assume that it was the same "back then" (in whatever time they are discussing).

So, names like "Linus, Cletus (Anacletus), Clement, Evaristus, Alexander" etc., were all "popes," even though there was no such thing as a "bishop" in Rome in those days (as there is virtual unanimous consensus among historians, both RC and Protestant, that "the church at Rome" through approximately 150 or 160 ad was a network of house churches ruled by a presbyterial council of elders.)

Such facts of history are simply lost on them.

Nowadays, officially, Rome is hanging its hat on the fact that the authority of bishops and the papacy were "developments," in "seed-form," so that (a) whatever history suggests that the actual situation was, it contained with it "seeds" that "grew into" the "mature doctrines" (of whatever they are talking about).

The problem is, across the spectrum, the "seeds" have nothing to do with what their mature doctrines have become. This is evident with respect to "authority" or "confession" (in the videos), the Marian doctrines, "no salvation outside of the church": time and again, what was believed or practiced in the early church has "developed" into a thing that is now quite its opposite.

 

[A.J.]

John,

Thanks for the input. In my reading of some of their written works, I discovered that these converts swam the Tiber for several reasons - one being the belief that only Rome stood the test of time in terms of morality. They would argue that while "Protestants" through the decades have rapidly experienced moral decline, Rome allegedly never gave in to compromise. Unlike its "Protestant" counterparts, Roman Catholicism as believed by these converts has definite and clear answers to modern day ethical questions (e.g. stem cell research, abortion, contraception, etc.).

Now I am firmly convinced of what we believe as confessional Protestants. I have biblical and historical reasons for being a Reformed believer. I believe that Rome preaches a false gospel and has made (and continually makes) a lot of a-historical conclusions. But the claim by Rome that Protestantism at large has no sure way of dealing with modern day ethical questions is something I have not examined in greater detail, and I would like to do more reading on this. Do you have any personal insights into this or book recommendations that address this claim specifically? Thanks.

 

[blhowes]

A little afternoon reading: One of the fullest expositions on the subject of apostolic succession, from a Presbyterian vantage point, is by Thomas Smyth, titled The Prelatical Doctrine of Apostolical Succession Examined

While you might not want to read the whole thing, look through the Table of Contents and you might be able to hone in on specific sections that answer some of your immediate questions.

Thanks. Interesting reading.

"there be only two sacraments ordained by Christ our Lord in the gospel, that is to say, baptism and the Lord's supper, neither of which may be dispensed by any but by a minister of the word lawfully ordained" (pg 37).

We do not, therefore, reject ordination as a proper and necessary service. We set apart, by the public and solemn imposition of hands, such as give credible evidence that they have been already called of God to the work of the ministry.(pg 41)

There's a missing link in my understanding:

When a person is lawfully ordained, I assume its by others who are also lawfully ordained. Going back through history then, there is a chain of ordained people who are ordained by people who'd been previously ordained. If that chain of people doesn't reach all the way back to the time of the apostles, how did that person at the first link get lawfully ordained?

 

[Backwoods Presbyterian]

His cheap little bookshelves are warped, too.

Well, they are.

Look's like my cheap IKEA shelves...

 

[A.J.]

When a person is lawfully ordained, I assume its by others who are also lawfully ordained. Going back through history then, there is a chain of ordained people who are ordained by people who'd been previously ordained. If that chain of people doesn't reach all the way back to the time of the apostles, how did that person at the first link get lawfully ordained?

Good question. I was lately thinking of this question too. There are answers in the thread, http://www.puritanboard.com/f47/lawful-ordination-8252/. Dr. McMahon also deals with this in his article, Lawful Ordination.

 

[johnbugay]

John,

Thanks for the input. In my reading of some of their written works, I discovered that these converts swam the Tiber for several reasons - one being the belief that only Rome stood the test of time in terms of morality. They would argue that while "Protestants" through the decades have rapidly experienced moral decline, Rome allegedly never gave in to compromise. Unlike its "Protestant" counterparts, Roman Catholicism as believed by these converts has definite and clear answers to modern day ethical questions (e.g. stem cell research, abortion, contraception, etc.).

It is true that some Protestant denominations have been unfaithful. But again, Rome does not mean the same thing when it talks about its "having stood the test of time in terms of morality."

Because of the view that Rome has of itself, it makes a distinction between what "the Church" has done, and what "the children of the Church" have done. So, "the Church," somehow is comprised of the visible Roman Catholic authority structure -- all the popes and bishops that have existed in time, down through history -- this "Church" exists as a kind of Aristotelian "form" that claims for itself all the eschatological promises made when the church is described in Scripture. It attributes to this "Church" all the perfection that is promised to the bride of Christ in the eschaton. It is this "Church" that has, as you say, "allegedly never gave in to compromise." Of course, this "Church" doesn't really exist. It is make believe.

In real life, we can see the evils perpetrated by the Roman Catholic heirarchy. They are not willing to take any responsibility for this at all. These are "the sins of the children of the Church."

Another thing that they think they mean is that, when you open the 1994 "Catechism of the Catholic Church," there is a moral law described which, again, they say, has never compromised. They believe they say all the right things, and they will therefore compare this "moral law" with, say, Anglican churches that say it's ok to ordain openly homosexual bishops.

Now I am firmly convinced of what we believe as confessional Protestants. I have biblical and historical reasons for being a Reformed believer. I believe that Rome preaches a false gospel and has made (and continually makes) a lot of a-historical conclusions. But the claim by Rome that Protestantism at large has no sure way of dealing with modern day ethical questions is something I have not examined in greater detail, and I would like to do more reading on this. Do you have any personal insights into this or book recommendations that address this claim specifically? Thanks.

This is an epistemological question; they will say that only the Roman Magisterium will provide the proper "interpretation" of questions regarding "faith and morals." See the link here:

Thoughts of Francis Turretin: Visualizing the Flow of Communication and Ultimate Interpreters

Again, they *claim* that having an infallible interpreter is necessary to understanding Scripture and moral law. But all that is really done is that, they replace "Scripture" (as a closed canon containing an infallible source of teaching of faith and morals) with "What the Magisterium says" (as a closed canon containing an infallible source of teaching on faith and morals. In reality, it is still left up to the individual to "interpret" this body of teaching (and Roman Catholics accept the Magisterium's teaching as a greater source of authority than what Scripture teaches.)

 

[Mayflower]

I just across the testimony of Peter Kreeft, a former reformed who became RC:
Hauled Aboard the Ark by Peter Kreeft

I was born into a loving, believing community, a Protestant "mother church" (the Reformed Church) which, though it had not for me the fullness of the faith, had strong and genuine piety. I believed, mainly because of the good example of my parents and my church. The faith of my parents, Sunday School teachers, ministers, and relatives made a real difference to their lives, a difference big enough to compensate for many shortcomings. "Love covers a multitude of sins."

I was taught what C. S. Lewis calls "mere Christianity," essentially the Bible. But no one reads the Bible as an extraterrestrial or an angel; our church community provides the colored glasses through which we read, and the framework, or horizon, or limits within which we understand. My "glasses" were of Dutch Reformed Calvinist construction, and my limiting framework stopped very far short of anything "Catholic!' The Catholic Church was regarded with utmost suspicion. In the world of the forties and fifties in which I grew up, that suspicion may have been equally reciprocated by most Catholics. Each group believed that most of the other group were probably on the road to hell. Christian ecumenism and understanding has made astonishing strides since then.

Dutch Calvinists, like most conservative Protestants, sincerely believed that Catholicism was not only heresy but idolatry; that Catholics worshipped the Church, the Pope, Mary, saints, images, and who knows what else; that the Church had added some inane "traditions of men" to the Word of God, traditions and doctrines that obviously contradicted it (how could they not see this? I wondered); and, most important of all, that Catholics believed "another gospel;' another religion, that they didn't even know how to get to Heaven: they tried to pile up brownie points with God with their good works, trying to work their way in instead of trusting in Jesus as their Savior. They never read the Bible, obviously.

I was never taught to hate Catholics, but to pity them and to fear their errors. I learned a serious concern for truth that to this day I find sadly missing in many Catholic circles. The typical Calvinist anti-Catholic attitude I knew was not so much prejudice, judgment with no concern for evidence, but judgment based on apparent and false evidence: sincere mistakes rather than dishonest rationalizations.

Though I thought it pagan rather than Christian, the richness and mystery of Catholicism fascinated me—the dimensions which avant-garde liturgists have been dismantling since the Silly Sixties. (When God saw that the Church in America lacked persecutions, he sent them liturgists.)

The first independent idea about religion I ever remember thinking was a question I asked my father, an elder in the church, a good and wise and holy man. I was amazed that he couldn't answer it. "Why do we Calvinists have the whole truth and no one else? We're so few. How could God leave the rest of the world in error? Especially the rest of the Christian churches?" Since no good answer seemed forthcoming, I then came to the explosive conclusion that the truth about God was more mysterious—more wonderfully and uncomfortably mysterious—than anything any of us could ever fully comprehend. (Calvinists would not deny that, but they do not usually teach it either. They are strong on God's "sovereignty," but weak on the richness of God's mystery.) That conviction, that the truth is always infinitely more than anyone can have, has not diminished. Not even all the infallible creeds are a container for all that is God.

I also realized at a very young age, obscurely but strongly, that the truth about God had to be far simpler than I had been taught, as well as far more complex and mysterious. I remember surprising my father with this realization (which was certainly because of God's grace rather than my intelligence, for I was only about eight, I think): "Dad, everything we learn in church and everything in the Bible comes down to just one thing, doesn't it? There's only one thing we have to worry about, isn't there?" "Why, no, I don't see that. There are many things. What do you mean?" "I mean that all God wants us to do—all the time—is to ask Him what He wants us to do, and then do it. That covers everything, doesn't it? Instead of asking ourselves, ask God!' Surprised, my father replied, "You know, you're right!'

After eight years of public elementary school, my parents offered me a choice between two high schools: public or Christian (Calvinist), and I chose the latter, even though it meant leaving old friends. Eastern Christian High School was run by a sister denomination, the Christian Reformed Church. Asking myself now why I made that choice, I cannot say. Providence often works in obscurity. I was not a remarkably religious kid, and loved the New York Giants baseball team with considerable more passion and less guilt than I loved God.

I won an essay contest in high school with a meditation on Dostoyevski's story "The Grand Inquisitor;" interpreted as an anti-Catholic, anti-authoritarian cautionary tale. The Church, like Communism, seemed a great, dark, totalitarian threat.

I then went to Calvin College, the Christian Reformed college which has such a great influence for its small size and provincial locale (Grand Rapids, Michigan) because it takes both its faith and its scholarship very seriously. I registered as a pre-seminary student because, though I did not think I was personally "called" by God to be a clergyman, I thought I might "give it a try." I was deeply impressed by the caption under a picture of Christ on the cross: "This is what I did for thee. What will you do for Me?"

But in college I quickly fell in love with English, and then Philosophy, and thus twice changed my major. Both subjects were widening my appreciation of the history of Western civilization and therefore of things Catholic. The first serious doubt about my anti-Catholic beliefs was planted in my mind by my roommate, who was becoming an Anglican: "Why don't Protestants pray to saints? There's nothing wrong in you asking me to pray for you, is there? Why not ask the dead, then, if we believe they're alive with God in Heaven, part of the 'great cloud of witnesses' that surrounds us (Hebrews 12)?" It was the first serious question I had absolutely no answer to, and that bothered me. I attended Anglican liturgy with my roommate and was enthralled by the same things that captivated Tom Howard (see his essay in this volume) and many others: not just the aesthetic beauty but the full-ness, the solidity, the moreness of it all.

I remember a church service I went to while at Calvin, in the Wealthy Street Baptist Temple (fundamentalist). I had never heard such faith and conviction, such joy in the music, such love of Jesus. I needed to focus my aroused love of God on an object. But God is invisible, and we are not angels. There was no religious object in the church. It was a bare, Protestant church; images were "idols." I suddenly understood why Protestants were so subjectivistic: their love of God had no visible object to focus it. The living water welling up from within had no material riverbed, no shores, to direct its flow to the far divine sea. It rushed back upon itself and became a pool of froth.

Then I caught sight of a Catholic spy in the Protestant camp: a gold cross atop the pole of the church flag. Adoring Christ required using that symbol. The alternative was the froth. My gratitude to the Catholic Church for this one relic, this remnant, of her riches, was immense. For this good Protestant water to flow, there had to be Catholic aqueducts. To change the metaphor, I had been told that reliance on external things was a "crutch!' I now realized that I was a cripple. And I thanked the Catholic "hospital" (that's what the Church is) for responding to my needs.

Perhaps, I thought, these good Protestant people could worship like angels, but I could not. Then I realized that they couldn't either. Their ears were using crutches but not their eyes. They used beautiful hymns, for which I would gladly exchange the new, flat, unmusical, wimpy "liturgical responses" no one sings in our masses—their audible imagery is their crutch. I think that in Heaven, Protestants will teach Catholics to sing and Catholics will teach Protestants to dance and sculpt.

I developed a strong intellectual and aesthetic love for things medieval: Gregorian chant, Gothic architecture, Thomistic philosophy, illuminated manuscripts, etc. I felt vaguely guilty about it, for that was the Catholic era. I thought I could separate these legitimate cultural forms from the "dangerous" Catholic essence, as the modern Church separated the essence from these discarded forms. Yet I saw a natural connection.

Then one summer, on the beach at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, I read St. John of the Cross. I did not understand much of it, but I knew, with undeniable certainty, that here was reality, something as massive and positive as a mountain range. I felt as if I had just come out of a small, comfortable cave, in which I had lived all my life, and found that there was an unsuspected world outside of incredible dimensions. Above all, the dimensions were those of holiness, goodness, purity of heart, obedience to the first and greatest commandment, willing God's will, the one absolute I had discovered, at the age of eight. I was very far from saintly, but that did not prevent me from fascinated admiration from afar; the valley dweller appreciates the height of the mountain more than the dweller on the foothills. I read other Catholic saints and mystics, and discovered the same reality there, however different the style (even St. Thérèse "The Little Flower"!) I felt sure it was the same reality I had learned to love from my parents and teachers, only a far deeper version of it. It did not seem alien and other. It was not another religion but the adult version of my own.

Then in a church history class at Calvin a professor gave me a way to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church on my own. The essential claim is historical: that Christ founded the Catholic Church, that there is historical continuity. If that were true, I would have to be a Catholic out of obedience to my one absolute, the will of my Lord. The teacher explained the Protestant belief. He said that Catholics accuse we who are Protestants of going back only to Luther and Calvin; but this is not true; we go back to Christ. Christ had never intended a Catholic-style Church, but a Protestant-style one. The Catholic additions to the simple, Protestant-style New Testament church had grown up gradually in the Middle Ages like barnacles on the hull of a ship, and the Protestant Reformers had merely scraped off the barnacles, the alien, pagan accretions. The Catholics, on the other hand, believed that Christ established the Church Catholic from the start, and that the doctrines and practices that Protestants saw as barnacles were, in fact, the very living and inseparable parts of the planks and beams of the ship.

I thought this made the Catholic claim empirically testable, and I wanted to test it because I was worried by this time about my dangerous interest in things Catholic. Half of me wanted to discover it was the true Church (that was the more adventurous half); the other half wanted to prove it false (that was the comfortable half). My adventurous half rejoiced when I discovered in the early Church such Catholic elements as the centrality of the Eucharist, the Real Presence, prayers to saints, devotion to Mary, an insistence on visible unity, and apostolic succession. Furthermore, the Church Fathers just "smelled" more Catholic than Protestant, especially St. Augustine, my personal favorite and a hero to most Protestants too. It seemed very obvious that if Augustine or Jerome or Ignatius of Antioch or Anthony of the Desert, or Justin Martyr, or Clement of Alexandria, or Athanasius were alive today they would be Catholics, not Protestants.

The issue of the Church's historical roots was crucial to me, for the thing I had found in the Catholic Church and in no Protestant church was simply this: the massive historical fact that there she is, majestic and unsinkable. It was the same old seaworthy ship, the Noah's ark that Jesus had commissioned. It was like discovering not an accurate picture of the ark, or even a real relic of its wood, but the whole ark itself, still sailing unscathed on the seas of history! It was like a fairy tale come true, like a "myth become fact;' to use C. S. Lewis' formula for the Incarnation.

The parallel between Christ and Church, Incarnation and Church history, goes still further. I thought, just as Jesus made a claim about His identity that forces us into one of only two camps, His enemies or His worshippers, those who call Him liar and those who call Him Lord; so the Catholic Church's claim to be the one true Church, the Church Christ founded, forces us to say either that this is the most arrogant, blasphemous and wicked claim imaginable, if it is not true, or else that she is just what she claims to be. Just as Jesus stood out as the absolute exception to all other human teachers in claiming to be more than human and more than a teacher, so the Catholic Church stood out above all other denominations in claiming to be not merely a denomination, but the Body of Christ incarnate, infallible, one, and holy, presenting the really present Christ in her Eucharist. I could never rest in a comfortable, respectable ecumenical halfway house of measured admiration from a distance. I had to shout either "Crucify her!" or "Hosanna!" if I could not love and believe her, honesty forced me to despise and fight her.

But I could not despise her. The beauty and sanctity and wisdom of her, like that of Christ, prevented me from calling her liar or lunatic, just as it prevented me from calling Christ that. But simple logic offered then one and only one other option: this must be the Church my Lord provided for me—my Lord, for me. So she had better become my Church if He is my Lord.

There were many strands in the rope that hauled me aboard the ark, though this one—the Church's claim to be the one Church historically founded by Christ—was the central and deciding one. The book that more than any other decided it for me was Ronald Knox's The Belief of Catholics. He and Chesterton "spoke with authority, and not as the scribes!' Even C. S. Lewis, the darling of Protestant Evangelicals, "smelled" Catholic most of the time. A recent book by a Calvinist author I went to high school with, John Beversluis, mercilessly tries to tear all Lewis' arguments to shreds; but Lewis is left without a scratch and Beversluis comes out looking like an atheist. Lewis is the only author I ever have read whom I thought I could completely trust and completely understand. But he believed in Purgatory, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and not Total Depravity. He was no Calvinist. In fact, he was a medieval.

William Harry Jellema, the greatest teacher I ever knew, though a Calvinist, showed me what I can only call the Catholic vision of the history of philosophy, embracing the Greek and medieval tradition and the view of reason it assumed, a thick rather than a thin one. Technically this was "realism" (Aquinas) as vs. "nominalism" (Ockham and Luther). Commonsensically, it meant wisdom rather than mere logical consistency, insight rather than mere calculation. I saw Protestant theology as infected with shallow nominalism and Descartes' narrow scientificization of reason.

A second and related difference is that Catholics, like their Greek and medieval teachers, still believed that reason was essentially reliable, not utterly untrustworthy because fallen. We make mistakes in using it, yes. There are "noetic effects of sin," yes. But the instrument is reliable. Only our misuse of it is not.

This is connected with a third difference. For Catholics, reason is not just subjective but objective; reason is not our artificial little man-made rules for our own subjective thought processes or intersubjective communications, but a window on the world. And not just the material world, but form, order, objective truth. Reason was from God. All truth was God's truth. When Plato or Socrates knew the truth, the logos, they knew Christ, unless John lies in chapter 1 of his gospel. I gave a chapel speech at Calvin calling Socrates a "common-grace Christian" and unwittingly scandalized the powers that be. They still remember it, 30 years later.

The only person who almost kept me Protestant was Kierkegaard. Not Calvin or Luther. Their denial of free will made human choice a sham game of predestined dice. Kierkegaard offered a brilliant, consistent alternative to Catholicism, but such a quirkily individualistic one, such a pessimistic and antirational one, that he was incompletely human. He could hold a candle to Augustine and Aquinas, I thought—the only Protestant thinker I ever found who could—but he was only the rebel in the ark, while they were the family, Noah's sons.

But if Catholic dogma contradicted Scripture or itself at any point, I could not believe it. I explored all the cases of claimed contradiction and found each to he a Protestant misunderstanding. No matter how morally bad the Church had gotten in the Renaissance, it never taught heresy. I was impressed with its very hypocrisy: even when it didn't raise its practice to its preaching, it never lowered its preaching to its practice. Hypocrisy, someone said, is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

I was impressed by the argument that "the Church wrote the Bible:" Christianity was preached by the Church before the New Testament was written—that is simply a historical fact. It is also a fact that the apostles wrote the New Testament and the Church canonized it, deciding which books were divinely inspired. I knew, from logic and common sense, that a cause can never be less than its effect. You can't give what you don't have. If the Church has no divine inspiration and no infallibility, no divine authority, then neither can the New Testament. Protestantism logically entails Modernism. I had to be either a Catholic or a Modernist. That decided it; that was like saying I had to be either a patriot or a traitor.

One afternoon I knelt alone in my room and prayed God would decide for me, for I am good at thinking but bad at acting, like Hamlet. Unexpectedly, I seemed to sense my heroes Augustine and Aquinas and thousands of other saints and sages calling out to me from the great ark, "Come aboard! We are really here. We still live. Join us. Here is the Body of Christ." I said Yes. My intellect and feelings had long been conquered; the will is the last to surrender.

One crucial issue remained to be resolved: Justification by Faith, the central bone of contention of the Reformation. Luther was obviously right here: the doctrine is dearly taught in Romans and Galatians. If the Catholic Church teaches "another gospel" of salvation by works, then it teaches fundamental heresy. I found here however another case of misunderstanding. I read in Aquinas' Summa on grace, and the decrees of the Council of Trent, and found them just as strong on grace as Luther or Calvin. I was overjoyed to find that the Catholic Church had read the Bible too! At Heaven's gate our entrance ticket, according to Scripture and Church dogma, is not our good works or our sincerity, but our faith, which glues us to Jesus. He saves us; we do not save ourselves. But I find, incredibly, that 9 out of 10 Catholics do not know this, the absolutely central, core, essential dogma of Christianity. Protestants are right: most Catholics do in fact believe a whole other religion. Well over 90% of students I have polled who have had 12 years of catechism classes, even Catholic high schools, say they expect to go to Heaven because they tried, or did their best, or had compassionate feelings to everyone, or were sincere. They hardly ever mention Jesus. Asked why they hope to be saved, they mention almost anything except the Savior. Who taught them? Who wrote their textbooks? These teachers have stolen from our precious children the most valuable thing in the world, the "pearl of great price;' their faith. Jesus had some rather terrifying warnings about such things something about millstones.

Catholicism taught that we are saved by faith, by grace, by Christ, however few Catholics understood this. And Protestants taught that true faith necessarily produces good works. The fundamental issue of the Reformation is an argument between the roots and the blossoms on the same flower.

But though Luther did not neglect good works, he connected them to faith by only a thin and unreliable thread: human gratitude. In response to God's great gift of salvation, which we accept by faith, we do good works out of gratitude, he taught. But gratitude is only a feeling, and dependent on the self. The Catholic connection between faith and works is a far stronger and more reliable one. I found it in C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, the best introduction to Christianity I have ever read. It is the ontological reality of we, supernatural life, sanctifying grace, God's own life in the soul, which is received by faith and then itself produces good works. God comes in one end and out the other: the very same thing that comes in by faith (the life of God) goes out as works, through our free cooperation.

I was also dissatisfied with Luther's teaching that justification was a legal fiction on God's part rather than a real event in us; that God looks on the Christian in Christ, sees only Christ's righteousness, and legally counts or imputes Christ's righteousness as ours. I thought it had to be as Catholicism says, that God actually imparts Christ to us, in baptism and through faith (these two are usually together in the New Testament). Here I found the fundamentalists, especially the Baptists, more philosophically sound than the Calvinists and Lutherans. For me, their language, however sloganish and satirizable, is more accurate when they speak of "Receiving Christ as your personal Savior."

Though my doubts were all resolved and the choice was made in 1959, my senior year at Calvin, actual membership came a year later, at Yale. My parents were horrified, and only gradually came to realize I had not lost my head or my soul, that Catholics were Christians, not pagans. It was very difficult, for I am a shy and soft-hearted sort, and almost nothing is worse for me than to hurt people I love. I think that I hurt almost as much as they did. But God marvelously binds up wounds.

I have been happy as a Catholic for many years now. The honeymoon faded, of course, but the marriage has deepened. Like all converts I ever have heard of, I was hauled aboard not by those Catholics who try to "sell" the church by conforming it to the spirit of the times by saying Catholics are just like everyone else, but by those who joyfully held out the ancient and orthodox faith in all its fullness and prophetic challenge to the world. The minimalists, who reduce miracles to myths, dogmas to opinions, laws to values, and the Body of Christ to a psycho-social club, have always elicited wrath, pity, or boredom from me. So has political partisanship masquerading as religion. I am happy as a child to follow Christ's vicar on earth everywhere he leads. What he loves, I love; what he leaves, I leave; where he leads, I follow. For the Lord we both adore said to Peter his predecessor, "Who hears you, hears Me." That is why I am a Catholic: because I am a Christian.

 

[Wayne]

His cheap little bookshelves are warped, too.

Well, they are.

Look's like my cheap IKEA shelves...

It was a cheap, warped little comment, void of any real craftsmanship, but it was all I could afford at the time.

 

[johnbugay]

See at 6.42 min !!!!!! YouTube - Peter's Keys, and No Salvation Outside the Church

In 1996, the Catholic historian Klaus Schatz wrote:

The further question whether there was any notion of an enduring office beyond Peter’s lifetime, if posed in purely historical terms, should probably be answered in the negative. That is, if we ask whether the historical Jesus, in commissioning Peter, expected him to have successors, or whether the author of the Gospel of Matthew, writing after Peter’s death, was aware that Peter and his commission survived in the leaders of the Roman community who succeeded him, the answer in both cases is probably “no.”...

If we ask in addition whether the primitive Church was aware, after Peter’s death, that his authority had passed to the next bishop of Rome, or in other words that the head of the community at Rome was now the successor of Peter, the Church’s rock and hence the subject of the promise in Matthew 16:18-19, the question, put in those terms, must certainly be given a negative answer....

If one had asked a Christian in the year 100, 200, or even 300 whether the bishop of Rome was the head of all Christians, or whether there was a supreme bishop over all the other bishops and having the last word in questions affecting the whole Church, he or she would certainly have said no.

Klaus Schatz, "Papal Primacy, from its Origins to Present," page 1

The individual who put together this video was not aware of the latest historical research. It's true that Schatz later argues in favor of "papal primacy," but he does so as a development of the fifth century; not as something which existed "from the beginning."

 

[Christusregnat]

"the church at Rome" through approximately 150 or 160 ad was a network of house churches ruled by a presbyterial council of elders.)

John,

Thanks for your valuable input. Aside from the Epistle of Clement, what source documents would you recommend for understanding the government of the church at Rome in particular, or the early Catholic Church's government?

Cheers,

Adam

 

[DeborahtheJudge]

The minimalists, who reduce miracles to myths, dogmas to opinions, laws to values, and the Body of Christ to a psycho-social club, have always elicited wrath, pity, or boredom from me. So has political partisanship masquerading as religion.

Thats hilarious because thats the sort of thing I think when I hear the name "Peter Kreeft"

I guess "vice is paying tribute to virtue".

 

[johnbugay]

"the church at Rome" through approximately 150 or 160 ad was a network of house churches ruled by a presbyterial council of elders.)

John,

Thanks for your valuable input. Aside from the Epistle of Clement, what source documents would you recommend for understanding the government of the church at Rome in particular, or the early Catholic Church's government?

Cheers,

Adam

Hi Adam: The work that describes this best is Peter Lampe's Amazon.com: From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (9780800627027): Peter Lampe: Books portions of this work are largely available on Google Books:

From Paul to Valentinus: Christians ... - Google Books

Lampe's summary section on this topic begins on page 397. This is a fascinating work because Lampe seemingly examines every scrap of paper from that era, every inscription every cemetary, every house, every archaeological dig from that era.

Eamon Duffy, a Roman Catholic historian, suggests that "all modern discussions of the issues must now start from (this) exhaustive and persuasive analysis by Peter Lampe." And many of them do. Roger Collins's recent work, "Keepers of the Keys of Heaven" seems to rely on it. It seems to me that Rome itself (see Schatz's comments above) has re-tooled its own understanding, based on this work (although they don't admit it -- but Robert Eno, another Catholic, who is a member of an RC order that teaches in Catholic seminaries, cites this work approvingly in his "The Rise of the Papacy."

For an exceptional discussion of the theological and exegetical issues surrounding the papacy, I'd recommend Oscar Cullman's "Peter: Disciple, Apostle, Martyr" -- although that's hard to find. But Cullman, a Lutheran, went into great detail not only into Peter's life and ministry, but also the notion of Apostolic Succession, and he, too, rejects it based not only on the Scriptural witness, but early church writings, too.

Norman Geisler's "Is Rome the True Church?" analyzes most of the contemporary arguments that Rome makes in favor of the papacy, although there are many of them, and he doesn't go into the kind of detail that one might like. Nevertheless, he concludes that Rome's claims are "seriously wanting" and its claims of infallibility "outlandish."

I'm highly motivated in this area largely because of the aggressiveness (not to mention the untruthfulness) that we've seen from Catholic apologists like the Called to Communion gang and also the individuals in the videos above. One thing about (legitimate) Roman claims: they are well thought out, and they seem to stick together very well. There's a ready answer/excuse for everything, and virtually every piece of it must be examined in detail. But virtually all of them are found wanting, too.

-----Added 12/21/2009 at 12:57:03 EST-----

The following selection is from Peter Lampe, “From Paul to Valentinus” “Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries”. Lampe is a professor of New Testament Theology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Lampe describes this work as, “a city-oriented historical study”. He uses a variety of material to give a historical picture of Christianity in the city of Rome during the first two centuries. These include literary materials, epigraphical and archaeological, which often become illuminating only in combination. Prominent here are Acts 28, Romans 15 and 16, the letters of 1 Clement, Ignatius to the Romans, and Shepherd of Hermas. All of these mention individuals in Rome (which he cross-references with other sources, including secular history and archaeology), practices, attitudes of the people there. The following is from Chapter 41, the conclusion of his book, “Fractionation, Monarchical Episcopacy, and Presbyterial Governance.”

Thesis: The fractionation in Rome favored a collegial presbyterial system of governance and prevented for a long time, until the second half of the second century, the development of a monarchical episcopacy in the city. Victor (c. 189-99) was the first who, after faint-hearted attempts by Eleutherus (c. 175-89), Soter (c. 166-75), and Anicetus (c. 155-66), energetically stepped forward as monarchical bishop and (at times, only because he was incited from the outside) attempted to place the different groups in the city under his supervision or, where that was not possible, to draw a line by means of excommunication. Before the second half of the second century there was in Rome no monarchical episcopacy for the circles mutually bound in fellowship. It would be presumptuous here to wish to write again a history of the ecclesiastical offices that are mentioned especially in 1 Clement and Hermas. My concern is to describe the correlation between fractionation and one factor of ecclesiastical order, the monarchical episcopate. This bridge should be illuminated. What happens across the bridge in the field of history of ecclesiastical offices can only be here briefly sketched – and perhaps motivate one to further investigation.

The reason this is important is because of the historical claims of the papacy. In the document Dominus Iesus, Joseph Ratzinger, the present pope, wrote this:

The Catholic faithful are required to profess that there is an historical continuity — rooted in the apostolic succession — between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church: “This is the single Church of Christ... which our Saviour, after his resurrection, entrusted to Peter's pastoral care (cf. Jn 21:17), commissioning him and the other Apostles to extend and rule her (cf. Mt 28:18ff.), erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth' (1 Tim 3:15).

Now, if we are talking about “all ages,” then this early age, from say, 60-160, there was no “monarchical bishop” in Rome. There was no "bishop" in Rome for nearly the first 130 years of the church’s existence.

Catholicism has various ways of dealing with this. But it is my contention that none of these meet the burden of proof necessary to substantiate the tremendous claims that the papacy has made about itself over the centuries.

Here is what Vatican I said about the papacy:

We therefore teach and declare that, according to the testimony of the Gospel, the primacy of jurisdiction over the universal Church of God was immediately and directly promised and given to blessed Peter the Apostle by Christ the Lord…

This is called “a clear doctrine of Holy Scripture as it has been ever understood by the Catholic Church...”

Remember the papacy is an “office” which is said to be "infallible" in its teaching on “faith and morals”. And this is certainly a matter of "faith". According to Dr. Ludwig Ott, in his work "Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma" (first published in 1952 and later republished in 1974), "According to Christ's ordinance, Peter is to have successors in his Primacy over the whole Church and for all time." This is a matter of dogma for Catholics to believe. "All time" includes "all times," including that first 160 years of the church.

This statement is not theological opinion. Catholic theology holds to a variety of levels of theological certainty. This particular belief has been held "de fide", which means it has been defined by a solemn judgment of the faith of the Pope or of a General Council.

There is a fundamental, foundational era in the Church, when this “primacy of jurisdiction” was not only unknown. The elements of it did not exist. Contrary to what Ratzinger said in Dominus Iesus, there was a clear historical discontinuity during the earliest years of the church.

(And given that Rome bases its authority on "Authority" presumably handed off from Jesus to Peter, those historical gaps should go a long, long way from dissuading anyone from thinking seriously about Roman claims.