RTS orlando graduation
- Thread starter bigheavyq
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Puritan Board Freshman
I have the highest regard for RTS. It was hearing 2 of their professors (Steve Childers and Richard Pratt) at a conference in Annapolis that moved me off of my disp., semi-Arminian(which I now realize is just another way of saying Arminian), single-cure gospel. Godspeed to your friend. RTS cares for the mind and
R. Scott Clark
Puritan Board Senior
My comments have nothing to do with RTS - I have good friends who work there, but let's remember what Colson did with Evangelicals and Catholics Together.
I'm not sorry to be a pain about this. It's the historian's job to remind folk of uncomfortable facts. A bunch of evangelicals discovered in the 90's that there are Roman Catholics who love Jesus and who've had a "born again experience" (e.g., Idris Cardinal Cassidy) and saw 60 million Roman Catholics as a potentially irresistible social bulwark against cultural decay. Because they don't think in terms of "two kingdoms" they believed that theological compromise was the only way to achieve their social-cultural goals.
I believe in common grace and common cause, but because I also believe in two kingdoms (the kingdom of God and the civic kingdom) I don't have to revise or compromise the gospel to make common cause on social issues with Rome or with Mormons. They are fellow image bearers and that's enough for common cultural activities. The civic kingdom is not the kOG. We don't have to agree on justification in order to work together to pave streets or save babies. Those works have to do with natural law not the gospel.
We went through a similar thing in the 1540's at Regensburg and it didn't work then and it doesn't work today.
It's fine to be a culture warrior, but at the cost of the gospel? By faith or by "faith alone?" Does it really matter?
That's a rhetorical question.
rsc
I'm not sorry to be a pain about this. It's the historian's job to remind folk of uncomfortable facts. A bunch of evangelicals discovered in the 90's that there are Roman Catholics who love Jesus and who've had a "born again experience" (e.g., Idris Cardinal Cassidy) and saw 60 million Roman Catholics as a potentially irresistible social bulwark against cultural decay. Because they don't think in terms of "two kingdoms" they believed that theological compromise was the only way to achieve their social-cultural goals.
I believe in common grace and common cause, but because I also believe in two kingdoms (the kingdom of God and the civic kingdom) I don't have to revise or compromise the gospel to make common cause on social issues with Rome or with Mormons. They are fellow image bearers and that's enough for common cultural activities. The civic kingdom is not the kOG. We don't have to agree on justification in order to work together to pave streets or save babies. Those works have to do with natural law not the gospel.
We went through a similar thing in the 1540's at Regensburg and it didn't work then and it doesn't work today.
It's fine to be a culture warrior, but at the cost of the gospel? By faith or by "faith alone?" Does it really matter?
That's a rhetorical question.
rsc
I've never cared for Childers since he tried to go after F. Nigel Lee back in the late 1980s during the PCA N. Texas Presbytery's examination of Dr. Lee after our church issued him a call to be our pastor. It was probably one of the longest examinations in NTP history to that point; perhaps still the longest. Childers seemed agitated; Theonomy was the issue and Childers would cite an opinion of Bahnsen's, and Dr. Lee would simply say, you need to ask Dr. Bahnsen about that. Didn't go anywhere, but there were men intent on killing the call if they could. They would vote against every portion of the examination, including the part containing Dr. Lee's testimony and conversion (if you know the story, you know how astounding that is that any Christian would vote not to sustain that part of the examination). In any event, the call fell apart, in main because of the treatment by NTP of Dr. Lee in my opinion. One RE (a rather pathetic fellow in all honesty) came up to Dr. Lee and said, 'I'm a private detective, and I have my eye on you'.
R. Scott Clark
Puritan Board Senior
Jonathan,
Well, the ECT folk were contradictory on this point.
Originally Jim Packer said (when he defended ECT in the pages of Christianity Today) that it was a theological, not cultural agenda that drove ECT. They really believed, he said, that they had achieved real unity. There's more to the story. Read the essay I linked. Jim Packer had been involved in this sort of thing in the UK in the '60's in the UK. See Alister McGrath's biography of Packer from the late 90's. Jim signed contradictory documents after ECT 1 repudiating it and then signed ETC and then another contradictory document by R C Sproul et co. If it was only social (which Packer denies) then why the documents on the gospel specifically? It doesn't add up. I think John Armstrong even signed the last document on the gospel, the name of which I can't recall just now.
Others, however, have indicated that it was really a cultural agreement. I don't know if anyone has done so in print.
As I see it, both ECT 1 and 2 were an attempt by evangelicals to get rid of the chief barrier, in their view, to social cooperation: the doctrine of justification. The did so by equivocating on key terms such as grace and faith in the doctrine of justification. Rome, for her part, was happy to see the evangelicals equivocate and compromise.
Chuck Colson is a well-meaning evangelical who, apparently, can figure out why are we quibbling over minutia when the culture is going we-know-where in a handbag.
So, Mike Horton and Bob Godfrey (he defended the Refomation at ETS in Orlando and one Spirit-filled evangelical rose to ask whether the panel all loved Jesus, and isn't that enough?) became the bad guys in the drama.
Read ECT 1 and 2 and see if it's only about the culture. Read the Regensburg essay. That had a "cultural" component too.
rsc
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