Monday, March 30, 2015

Catholic Acknowledgment Of The Solas Before The Reformation

James Swan has a good post citing a Catholic Answers broadcast in which "Steve Weidenkopf, a lecturer of Church History at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College", acknowledges that the concepts of sola fide and sola scriptura were advocated prior to the Reformation. The post recommends some other resources on the subject, and so does one of the commenters. Here's a post I've written on the subject of sola fide before the Reformation, and here's my archive of posts on Evangelical doctrines in general prior to the Reformation.

3 comments:

  1. Nothing new, you can go all the way back to Pelagius for Sola Fide. "But to one who does not work, but who believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness. When an ungodly person converts, God justifies him by faith alone, not for the good works he did not have" -

    In this case Luther invented, most likely is a synedoche for Luther made popular, but i suspect Swan wasn't interested in reading people charitably. Much ado about nothing

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    1. Tap wrote:

      "Nothing new, you can go all the way back to Pelagius for Sola Fide."

      You then provide a quote without any documentation or discussion, ignore all of the counterarguments provided in James Swan's thread and here, and go on to assert:

      "In this case Luther invented, most likely is a synedoche for Luther made popular, but i suspect Swan wasn't interested in reading people charitably."

      How is it "charitable" to equate "invent" with "make popular"? That's not charity. It's revisionism. Swan also cites Catholic Answers referring to sola fide as Martin Luther's "new doctrine". Is "new" also a "synecdoche" for "made popular"? In my thread on sola fide linked above, I cite another Catholic apologist making the same sort of claim Catholic Answers has made, but with different language. Is that language also a "synecdoche" that's been misunderstood? Why is it that this language Catholics keep using just happens to keep getting misunderstood in the same manner, and the vast majority of Catholics using the language offer no clarifications like what you're offering? Rather than so many Catholics communicating so poorly and showing so little concern for clarifying what they meant, it's more likely that you're trying to rewrite history.

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  2. If "Tap" is a defender of Rome, such evaluations of my lack of charity ring hollow to me (I've been maligned by Rome's defenders for years). Pointing out that Rome's defenders are not unified in regard to theological history is not an act of meanness, but rather pointing out a double standard. Catholic Answers promotes one version, their scholarly guest another. These are the same folks that think "To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant," yet when they do Reformation history, well, standards of consistency don't appear to apply, nor does the magisterium care to step in to set things straight.

    As is typical of Rome's defenders, they avoid the obvious that the guest on Catholic Answers "wasn't interested in reading people charitably," in regard to Luther, and spent an hour mis-characterizing him as a political revolutionary.

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