Perry Robinson says:
This is absurd. An oath to a body that has no real authority and professes contrary to divine teaching is lacks all binding authority. He is jsut begging the question as to whether it is a legitimate church and authority.
That’s an illuminating window into what passes for Eastern Orthodox morality. You don’t have to honor contractual agreements or other commitments as long as the second party to your agreement lacks “real” authority. You can go into the agreement with no intention of keeping the agreement.
Logically, this means Orthodox believers are only obligated to be honor agreements they enter into with Orthodox institutions or fellow Orthodox adherents. They are free to practice dissimulation with outsiders.
I think if your argument holds true, then Luther needs to be held to the fire for teaching contrary theology to the oath he not only held as a Roman Catholic, but as a learned thinker in Rome. John Calvin was not only Roman Catholic when he wrote the Institutes, but was earning a living from Rome while writing the Institutes. Your tradition has such ideas within its own formation, but Perry is somehow wrong?
ReplyDeleteI didn't say it was inherently wrong to change your mind or break a vow.
ReplyDeleteBut Perry takes the position, as a matter of principle, that we only have to honor agreements or oaths we make to members of the in-group.
One big distinction is that when Luther and Calvin wrote, the Catholic Church was the only game in town in western Europe. There were no rival Protestant denominations (yet) to "defect" to - at least, none whose leaders' heads hadn't long ago rotted atop spikes in southern France. Calvin/ Luther also had a bona fide hope that the institutional church would in fact reform in the direction they were proposing. Schism was a last resort.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, Mr Beckwith and other converts have a very much available alternative ship to jump to, and moreover they don't see it as "compounding schism" - rather, as reducing schism - by quitting their Protestant denomination.
As to Perry's comment, he seems to say that the lack of authority AND professing a false gospel according to divine teaching lacks binding authority on the individual.
ReplyDeleteCan I ask, what would be the correct way of leaving the reformed church for Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy in your eyes?
Interestingly, there seem to be a faction of Catholics out there in cyberspace who maintain _both_
ReplyDelete(a) that Luther was justified (NPI)in leaving the RCC if he really did believe it was apostate (unfortunately the concept of "informed conscience", although of course always inchoate in the Timeless Tradition, had not yet been, ah, fully developed in the 1500s),
but also
(b) that Luther was not justified in breaking his monkish vows by taking a wife after he left.
This is distinct from the standard meme that reduces the motives for the Reformation to "desire to illicitly marry" various Katherines and Catherines. Rather, these bods are saying that Luther still owed God a duty to keep his promise never to marry, even after he came to believe that God no more wanted Luther not to marry than He wanted Luther to circumcise infants.
Debating one of these folks, I tried an analogy and asked whether a Baptist who became to Catholic was still bound by his teenage pledge to abstain from alcohol, even though this would deprive him of half of the Eucharist to no (in Catholic eyes) good purpose. He replied that Eucharistic wine, once duly transubstantiated, was no longer wine. I countered that "alcoholic blood with all the incidents, appearances and physicial properties of wine" was still an intoxicant, but AFAIK he never got back to me with on that.
ERIC CASTLEMAN SAID:
ReplyDelete"Can I ask, what would be the correct way of leaving the reformed church for Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy in your eyes?"
i) There is no right way to leave truth for error.
ii) I wouldn't cast the issue narrowly in terms of a reformed church. Let's just say a Bible-believing church.
iii) If the convert is formally a member, he should formally resign.
If he just attends regularly, that's different.
iv) This is about more than a layman leaving one denomination for another. It involves an ex-OPC minister.
If he ceases to believe the theology he swore to when he was ordained, then he needs to resign.
v) In the case of Beckwith, he's never come clean. He's never faced up to the fact that he was playing both sides of the fence, that he was operating under false pretenses.
When he ceased to be Protestant, he had no business retaining his position as president of the ETS. But he plays this "evangelical Catholic" game.
He can definite Catholicism as "evangelical" if he likes, but that's not the point. It's not his Catholic definition of "evangelical" that's relevant. Rather, it's a question of how that's understood by the ETS.
After all, Protestants have their own way of defining "catholic," but that doesn't make them Roman Catholic.