“What’s true”

Fr Bryan (314) [not Bryan Cross, but someone who is, I believe, an Anglican priest]. Quoting yours truly, he says:

why are you here?

If God doesn’t care if we are systematically correct, and if God doesn’t care that our differences matter, and if it is God’s job to maintain unity and not yours, than why have you been posting on these things here and elsewhere on the internet? Surely you must believe we are either in heresy or schism and that this matters.. How do you make this determination?

There are other categories beside “heresy or schism” and if you looked at my comment above to Burton, I believe that the most important category is “what’s true”. Not “what’s true” in the sense that “after further review”, the Roman Catholic Church can come up with a version of its own doctrine that is “not inconsistent” with history. My overriding interest is to understand the broad sweep of what God is actually doing in history – Old Testament and New Testament (and of course, in Church History as well).

Your statement “If God doesn’t care if we are systematically correct” is actually a bit of a mischaracterization of what I said. While I don’t believe He requires that the individual comes to a systematic theology that’s “infallibly correct”, that’s not to say that there aren’t better or worse theologies, or that we ought not to strive for what’s better. We do need to approach Him in faith, and that does require a substantially correct understanding of who He is and what He has done for us. What I would say to Burton is that even though he has been exploring this for years, God is not pressuring him.

Why have I been posting? Because, while I do have an overriding interest to understand what God is doing in history, I’m convinced that the Roman Catholic “development of” and “accounting of” its own “authority” (specifically the papacy, but other components of it as well) is one of the greatest and most harmful hoaxes in history, and I’m interested in doing what I can do to propagate the truth about such things.

Not that I rely on my own accounting of things. No, I’m tying together threads from historical and theological research. My story very closely approximates Calvin’s account of things in his Institutes, and it incorporates (as others have noted) other “scholarly enthusiasms” that I’ve picked up over the years. The names of the scholars I appreciate include Oscar Cullmann, T.F. Torrance, Peter Lampe, Eamon Duffy, Raymond Brown, John Meier, Larry Hurtado, Thomas Schreiner, G.K. Beale, R.T. France, John Nolland, Douglas Moo, D.A. Carson, Michael Horton, Carl Trueman, R.Scott Clark, John Frame, James Anderson, Michael J. Kruger, and yes, there are many others. Not all of these individuals specifically address Roman Catholicism, but some of them do, and where they do, there is a remarkably consistent story. If you’ve been following this thread, you’ve seen hints of it.

Now, to call Roman Catholicism a “hoax” is not to say that all Roman Catholics are going to hell. We have a way of saying this in our circles, and it is: “they’ll get to heaven in spite of their Roman Catholicism, not because of it”.

Regarding the “hoax” factor again, and why I am specifically “here”, I knew Jason Stellman several years ago, and I knew what Bryan was writing about before this site came up. I think Bryan is tremendously gifted, and I know a bit about his background, and not only do I believe he is deceived by the hoax, but that he himself is propagating it. I know too that I myself have “come home to Rome” in the past, and that further down the line, people who at first embrace Rome, do cycle out of it, too.

In terms of “unity”, I think as more study on Scripture and church history becomes generally available, more people will come to a “unity in the truth” such as that embraced by, say James White the Reformed Baptist and Turretinfan, the staunch Presbyterian and even by the Embryo Parson, a Traditional Anglican (who started his journey as Reformed, spent 13 years in Eastern Orthodoxy and now has returned to Traditional Anglicanism), than there is, say, between even two staunch conservative Roman Catholics of the type that James Swan writes about in his series “Blueprint for Anarchy”.