Sola Fide In Acts 19

Acts 19:1-7 is a neglected passage in discussions of justification. And there's a neglect of the evidence for sola fide in the narrative portions of scripture in general. I want to post something I recently wrote in an email exchange, summing up the significance of the passage:

The reception of the Holy Spirit is associated with justification elsewhere, and Paul expects the Holy Spirit to be received at the time of coming to faith in Acts 19:2. The people he was addressing turned out to be in an exceptional situation, but Paul's question reflects what he considered normative.

I've discussed the passage further in previous threads, like here and here.

How “Pope Francis” is Dealing with the “Leaving Home” Network

The “Leaving Home” network (leaving Roman Catholicism) is much larger than the “Coming Home” network. And this seems to be one of the key things that’s driving the Bergoglio papacy.

There is a very good reason why we see lots of “Coming Home” stories of conversion to Roman Catholicism, but not many the other way. When one person “comes home”, that really is all they can point to. Just one conversion is a big thing. They can’t point to huge numbers traveling in their direction.

A Roman Catholic may make the claim about the Good Shepherd going to find one lost sheep. But that presupposes that there are another 99 already “home”. In this case, the 99 are flooding away in droves.

The other side of that “home to Rome” coin is that there are simply too many conversion stories that are going the other way. Too many to report. Too many people are leaving.

When someone becomes Roman Catholic, it is just a big event for them. When a Roman Catholic leaves and becomes Protestant, well, that sort of thing happens all the time. Pew Research has recently reported that among US Roman Catholics:

Rome's moral compromise

That the Roman Catholic church has been morally compromised by the sodomite subculture is now part of its indelible public image. However, the moral compromise doesn't begin with that.

Historically, Roman Catholicism became the state religion of Europe and (prior to the Reformation) Great Britain. To enjoy that monopoly required royal patronage. But there was a price for that. It meant the Catholic church had to be very indulgent towards the never-ending promiscuities of kings, princes, and nobles. Royal harems, royal courtesans, as well as mistresses to service aristocrats, and so on and so forth. Court preachers were privy to all that. But it's not as if they routinely denounced it from the pulpit. Had they done so, they'd rapidly fallen out of favor with the royals and nobles.  As a result, the European ruling class has never taken the moral authority of Rome seriously. That wouldn't be possible. There was always a Gentleman's agreement between the church of Rome and the sex life of the ruling class. 

De Chirico: Rome will Absorb “Pope Francis”

Marking Time

In an article with the same title, Leonardo De Chirico asks, “What Happens If Catholics Think the Pope Is a Heretic?” The short answer is found at the end of the article:

Nothing is going to break abruptly and, more importantly, no biblical reformation is possible under these conditions. Roman Catholicism will be stretched and go through a stress test, but will be able to handle both Francis’ catholicity and his critics’ insistence on the Roman component. The synthesis will be expanded, but the gospel will not be allowed to change Rome. This is the reason why the Reformation is not over.

The article primarily catalogues the ruckus that has been going on in the controversies surrounding “Amoris Laetitia” and the subsequent protests, first from the Dubia Cardinals, then from the “Filial Correction” crowd (Roman Catholic priests and theologians), and finally from Fr Thomas Weinandy, who wrote an open letter to Bergoglio stating, “a chronic confusion seems to mark your pontificate obscured by the ambiguity of your words and actions.”

De Chirico asks, “What is happening in the Roman Catholic Church? Is Rome on the eve of an internal breaking point with disastrous consequences?”

Interestingly, he frames the issue as one of “Roman” elements vs “catholic” ones. “Pope Francis” and “Vatican II” on the “catholic” side (De Chirico uses the word “Catholic” with a capital “C” from time to time, but I think he means small-c “catholic).

He suggests, however, that the “inner and constitutive dynamics of Roman Catholicism” – and the synthesis of “Roman” and “Catholic” will enable the system to survive, because the system was created in order to accommodate various swings back and forth between both.

Here is his larger explanation:

Shortage of Priests Threatens Roman Catholicism in Big Cities in US

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/11/28/the-continuing-vocation-crisis-in-the-united-states/

It seems that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles ordained only seven men in 2017 for well over 4 million Catholics. That reminded me of the kind of vocation data that have plagued the large archdioceses of South America for centuries. So I looked into our other large archdioceses, and I must say the picture is rather stunning.

Take the five largest: Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Houston. In 2017, these five ordained a total of 33 men to serve a combined population of 12.5 million Catholics. (Again, like what we have long seen in South America where the vocations were so few that most priests come from outside that continent.) Here too, a significant number of those being ordained were born outside the United States. Indeed, in one of these local churches not a single ordained priest was born in the United States. A half-century ago those 33 ordained would have been fairly common in a single large archdiocese. Obviously, those days are gone.

Keep in mind that in a system where grace is dependent upon sacraments, which can only be performed by sacerdotal priests (and only those priests where the ever more loosely-defined form of “succession” is available), priests are the coin of the realm.

This current lack of coin reflects the bankruptcy of the system. Perhaps the system will look toward “inflationary measures” – the kind of money-printing you would find in a third world government – enabling married men or women to become priests. This type of discussion IS occurring. But such a move would be both highly unlikely (admitting “developments” that would be very painful admissions), as well as the end of the sacerdotal and Medieval Roman Catholic system as the world has known it from, say, the year 400 till 2000.

This writer is looking to the future through smaller Roman Catholic dioceses such as Wichita Kansas, and Lincoln, Nebraska, where the numbers are less lopsided. But they are still highly strained.

“When ‘Catholic’ is not ‘catholic’”

This is my review of Roman but Not Catholic by Jerry Walls and Ken Collins, and it's my first review for the Reformation21.org site: http://www.reformation21.org/featured/when-catholic-is-not-catholic.php. “This is a book that I wish had been written in the 1970's, when I was first looking at the question of whether I should remain Roman Catholic.”

Fake Good News

I don't know what else to call this. This is the precise thing that I grew up with, the precise thing that didn't ring true, the precise thing that I investigated, the precise kind of dishonesty with the facts that I rejected.

Why Be Catholic and Not Just Christian?

I could not be more disappointed that this sort of thing is what counts for popular among Roman Catholics.

“Roman but Not Catholic”: Authors Jerry Walls and Ken Collins

Jerry Walls (l) and Ken Collins

This is part of a review series I’m going to be doing on the Jerry Walls and Ken Collins work “Roman but Not Catholic: What Remains at Stake 500 Years after the Reformation” (Grand Rapids, Mi: Baker Academic, 2017). The work is unique in that it explores very many of the historical developments that led to the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church that we see today.

I want to first briefly talk about the authors of this work. They are not the kind of traditional authors that one might find mentioned on this blog.

For example, in an earlier comment, a good Reformed friend wrote, “Never thought I would buy a book authored by Jerry Walls”. Jerry certainly has a reputation here at Triablogue, most notably for a work and a sentiment entitled “Why I’m Not a Calvinist”.

The Fall of the Roman Catholic Church

Important note: This has already happened.

For all of you naysayers out there who are prone to say “the gates of hell shall not prevail”, keep in mind here that I’m not making a prediction. I’m reporting on what has already happened. This is going to be largely a personal note, and more anecdotal than I’d like it to be. But I want to explain some of the excitement that I have right now, and some of the hope that I have for the future.

John Bugay, Cradle Catholic

I’ve been dealing with Roman Catholicism for a long time. I was born into a Catholic family. I grew up Roman Catholic. It meant something to be “a good Catholic”.

On my mother’s side of the family, my great grandparents were immigrants from Slovakia. My great grandfather died when I was very young – I remember being at his deathbed at some point. My great grandmother then went to live with my Uncle Eddie, who was the sixth child in that family of six (and the youngest brother to my grandmother). They had a nice, 1950’s style brick home in one of the newer suburban areas around Pittsburgh.

My uncle just had a young family at the time. He may or may not have had one small child at the time, my cousin Michael who, oddly, was my mother’s cousin. Because of their relative age, we visited them a lot.

It was the kind of big Catholic family that was prominent back then. My great grandmother didn’t know much English, even in the early 1960’s, but the phrase I heard all the time was, “you good boy Johnny”. She said that to me all the time, and rarely did she say anything else. And I’d smile and say “thank you”. We were in church very frequently, as part of a large, extended family – weddings, baptisms, funerals. And there was much family time and fellowship. It worked that way on my mother’s side of the family, where my mother was from one of the older siblings, and also on my father’s side of the family, where he was one of the younger siblings. I had some same-aged cousins, but most of my cousins were a lot older, with families of their own.

That was the form of pre-Vatican II form of “Roman Catholicism” that I knew in the early and middle 1960’s. You didn’t get “catechized” back then. You lived it. You lived your life, and life revolved around “the Church”.

Van Til was “Prophetically True” on Roman Catholicism

Daniel the Prophet Accurately Describes Roman Catholicism

Leonardo De Chirico explicates Van Til’s view of
the syncretism of Roman Catholicism

In his latest issue of Vatican Files, Leonard De Chirico has published an excerpt of a paper given at a September 2014 conference in Rome entitled “Rerum Novarum: Neo-Calvinism and Roman Catholicism”. Google translates “Rerum Novarum” as “of the new things”. That is also the title of a papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum, by “Pope Leo XIII”, and the title indicates “the spirit of revolutionary change” – beginning with the “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”.

This theme was an appropriate point of contact between neo-Calvinists of the late 19th century, and it was deemed to be the theme of a program in 2014 as well. Here is the theme of the program from the organizers:

Roman Catholicism was a world player when neo-Calvinism began to develop from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. At that time, both Catholicism and Protestantism went through substantial changes. For the neo-Calvinists, Catholicism functioned as both an antagonist and an ally in their struggle to uphold religion in the modern age of ‘rerum Novarum’. The neo-Calvinists were the first Protestants to cooperate openly with Roman Catholics in politics and on social issues. Theologically they were particularly interested in neo-Thomism, but remained critical of Roman Catholicism until after the Second World War and the Second Vatican Council.

The conference will focus on the theological, ecclesial, philosophical, political, social and cultural interactions between the two traditions: in what ways did they influence and approach each other, on which aspects did they continue to differ and why, and how could their relationship over a century and a half best be described?

This, it seems to me, is a useful approach that Reformed scholars and believers can take in addressing Roman Catholicism. Especially useful, it seems, is the paper given by De Chirico (excerpted here, and to be given in a fuller form in a book-length project soon to be released from this conference): “The clay of Paganism with the iron of Christianity: Cornelius Van Til’s Critique of Roman Catholicism”.

A sign of the future of the Roman Catholic Church in the US

The future of Roman Catholicism in the US?

This National Catholic Reporter (NCR) article caught my eye since it is local: Pittsburgh plan would consolidate 188 parishes into 48 groups. What we are seeing, I think, is nothing less than a snapshot of the future of the Roman Catholic Church in the US.

From the article:

There will be grief, but a new, more effective church outreach will emerge out of a massive planned consolidation in the Pittsburgh Diocese, diocesan spokesman Bob DeWitt told NCR.

He spoke after a diocesan planning commission, which includes DeWitt, recommended to Bishop David Zubik that the diocese arrange its 188 current parishes into 48 groups. The plan now goes to the bishop for a decision …

While other archdioceses and dioceses in the Northeast and Midwest have closed and consolidated parishes in the past three decades, including Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Boston, and, most recently, Hartford, Connecticut, no diocese has undertaken such a massive change. The plan will reshape the concept of parish in the Pittsburgh Diocese's six counties.

The diocese needs to act boldly to deal with a decline in the number of priests and Catholics in the pews, said DeWitt.

The Roman Catholic Problem with Reality

“Rome has a problem with reality”

In the end ... [Rome] has a problem with reality

I’ve been reading through an advanced copy of the text of “Roman but Not Catholic”, by Jerry Walls and Ken Collins. I’ve just finished Chapter 7 (of about 20 chapters), and I came across this nugget:

In the end, Rome not only has a problem with the church, the living body of Christ well beyond its walls, but also has a problem with reality, a reality that is right in front of its eyes ...

They make this statement in the context of a discussion that those who leave the Roman Catholic Church are still under some kind of anathema. It is in the context of conciliar documents, present and past, and of Canon Law, which is still on the books and in fact was revised in 1983. They make this statement in the context of a section entitled “Giving Rome the Benefit of the Doubt”.

I’ll look forward to explicating this “problem with reality” in a review series that I’m planning to do when the book is released October 17.

Roman Catholic Doctrinal Inventions (and cherry-picking support for them)

Please share these videos with your Roman Catholic friends, either on Facebook or wherever you tend to find them. Dr. Robert Godfrey provides excellent summary statements of prevalent Roman myths, in the context of what Roman Catholic apologists are always telling us, in a couple of very short summaries.

The Inventions of Rome Part 1: Godfrey directly addresses Roman Catholic apologists here: especially the myth that Rome is fundamentally unchanged, with an unbroken tradition for 2000 years. He calls this notion "fundamentally untrue and historically inaccurate".Godfrey traces the various historical phases of the Roman church through history, and how it has changed at various times.



The inventions of Rome Part 2: A look at "development" and how Rome invented "The Eucharist".



Rome "cherry-picks" what early church writings say, that seem to support its later doctrines. But when you look at them more broadly, that language is used very loosely, and the early writers can also support Lutheran and Reformed doctrines. If Rome's story about itself is "fundamentally untrue", as Godfrey says, and as I thoroughly believe, then calling it out, in any period, is a necessary duty of Christians in any age.

Ratzinger: “Barque of Peter is leaking, on the verge of capsizing”

In a funeral message yesterday, former pope Joseph Ratzinger suggested that the Roman Catholic Church “has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing”. The message was related at the funeral of Cardinal Meisner, who was one of the dubia cardinals, (asking “Pope Francis” if his statement Amoris Laetitia had actually contradicted “church teaching”).

July 15, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Benedict XVI sent a sobering message at the funeral of Cardinal Joachim Meisner today, saying he was moved at the dubia cardinal's ability to "live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even when the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing."

The Church "stands in particularly pressing need of convincing shepherds who can resist the dictatorship of the spirit of the age and who live and think the faith with determination," Pope Benedict said in a message read by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his personal secretary and head of the papal household. Because of this "pressing need," Meisner "found it difficult to leave his post."

"What moved me all the more was that, in this last period of his life, he learned to let go and to live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even when the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing," the pope emeritus concluded.

Meisner, who was 83, was one of the four cardinals who sent Pope Francis a dubia asking if Amoris Laetitia is aligned with Catholic morality. He died still awaiting the pope's response. Although Pope Francis hasn't answered the dubia, he has given his approval to interpretations of the controversial exhortation that say those living in adulterous unions may receive Holy Communion.

Canon lawyer Kurt Martens said Pope Benedict's message was an "amazing yet diplomatic form of support for [the] dubia Cardinals."

How Vatican II Changed the Roman Catholic Church

"The core of what Roman Catholicism stands for has never changed". Probably one of the main challenges is going to be The battle over words. Rome uses basic Protestant language, and tries to re-define it, in its own way.

See also: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2013/03/weigle-room-at-christianity-today.html

Carl Trueman Plays the Sanctimonious Fool

I’m sorry if this sounds uncharitable, I really am. However, it’s so sad to me when a seminary professor at a leading Reformed seminary – and one who’s a celebrity to boot – gets things wrong like this. He says in a recent First Things blog article:

I am not a Roman Catholic and not a huge fan of much Roman Catholic theology. But I had long thought that, when it came to social teaching and hard-headed moral thinking, the Roman Catholic Church was light years ahead of most Protestants in both sophistication and precision. That no longer seems to be the case.

I wonder if he has really been following along, or if he just picked the thing up in a vacuum and responded sanctimoniously. The problem is, Trueman in this very article demonstrates that he hasn’t got a good grasp on what Roman Catholicism really teaches in this case, about marriage, nor has he identified what they’re talking about when they talk about “adultery”. In most cases, “Roman Catholic moral thinking” is far more sanctimony than it is “sophisticated” or “precise”.

Earlier in the article, he writes:

Last week I stumbled across the document issued recently by the Roman Catholic bishops of Malta. It is an attempt to establish “criteria” for “applying” the now-infamous Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia…

Paragraph 9 of the Maltese bishops’ document is one for the ages: We are told of “complex situations” that might make it “humanly impossible” to avoid illicit sex. I wonder what those situations might be?

“Illicit sex” in this case, in the real world (not a conservative Roman Catholic view) is simply sex between a legally married couple. Traditional, conservative Roman Catholics view these documents as discussing the fate of a Roman Catholic couple, married according to Rome’s “sacramental marriage”, who hasn’t gone through their Annulment process, who gets divorced and civilly re-married.

“A civil war is in progress in the [Roman Catholic] Church”

“A civil war is in progress in the Church”:

“A civil war is in progress in the Church” .... The conflict was opened, consciously or not, by Pope Francis himself, most of all after the Exhortation Amoris laetitia, and today the Church is not advancing but sinking, into a ground furrowed by crevices and deep divisions.

Someone compared the failure of Pope Francis’ pontificate to that of Barack Hussein Obama. What Washington took eight years to accomplish has now happened in Rome after 3 years: the passage from the euphoria of the first hour to the final depression, having totally missed the targets that had been pre-established. Yet, it would be a mistake to read Pope Francis’ pontificate in purely political terms. Pope Francis would never have been able to pronounce Obama’s “Yes, we can”. For a Pope, unlike a politician, not everything is possible. The Supreme Pontiff has supreme power, full and immediate over the entire Church, but cannot change the Divine Law that Jesus Christ gave to His Church, nor the natural law that God has impressed in the heart of every man. He is the Vicar of Christ, but not his successor.

Even Roman Catholics see the corrosive, duplicitous, and laughable nature of Pope Bergoglio’s “Amoris Laetitia”

The rhetorical strategy to debunk the dubia:

As you read through these talking points, you might notice some contradictions. We’re saying that it’s all very simple, yet we’re saying that it’s all very complex. We’re insisting that “Rome has spoken,” yet the whole point is that Rome has not spoken, leaving fundamental questions up to individual priests. We’re inveighing against “clericalism,” yet giving priests enormous new powers with no means of accountability. We’re saying that the Pope is a pastor rather than a lawmaker, yet we’re trying to lay down the law. We’re telling people that Amoris Laetitia upholds the traditional Church teaching, yet we’re making fun of that teaching. These are not comfortable arguments to make. That’s why we’re trying to end the debate quickly. When in doubt, remember point #1: Don’t talk about the dubia.

Bryan Cross: “The ordinary Catholic life just is the long dark night of the soul”

That headline is a direct quote from Bryan, taken from a February 17 2016 Bryan Cross comment on this Jason Stellman blog post. (The topic of Stellman came up earlier this week, and so I took a look, and came up with this conversation.) In that blog post, Stellman is complaining that “my experience with God is largely characterized by divine absence, the ‘real absence of Christ’”. I don’t want to get into Stellman’s self-absorbed hand wringing, but here’s the larger Bryan Cross quote:

I don’t have the Calvary Chapel background that you do. But I do have a Pentecostal background. Of course we both went through a substantive Reformed period. But it took me some time to realize that some remainders of that original spirituality lingered on, a tradition in which spiritual experience in its subjective phenomenological sense, is extremely important, and is the measure of one’s closeness to God, perhaps even the very measure and ground of one’s faith.

Hold this thought, because this is not at all what the Reformation faith – the earliest Christian faith – was about. I’ll address this below.

Is Rome the answer?

A stock objection to sola Scriptura is that Scripture alone is not enough to furnish answers on important ethical questions. That's why some erstwhile evangelicals convert to Catholicism. That's a standard argument in the repertoire of Catholic apologetics. 

However, it presents an interesting conundrum for Catholicism. For instance, Catholic moral theology regards lying as intrinsically wrong:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a8.htm

That might seem to simplify your moral options. If lying is always wrong, then you must take that option off the table. 

By contrast, a Christian ethicist who doesn't think lying is always wrong has the more complicated task of attempting to provide criteria that distinguish licit from illicit lying. So the Catholic position appears to have the benefit of moral clarity. However, the Catholic prohibition is deceptively simple inasmuch as the definition of lying is philosophically intricate and unsettled:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lying-definition/

There's no agreed upon definition of what constitutes a lie. And to my knowledge, the Magisterium has never provided an authoritative definition. Indeed, I doubt it's even possible for the Magisterium to define a lie with sufficient precision to rule out various counterexamples. 

So that generates a Catholic conundrum: Rome says "never tell a lie" without defining its terms. "Don't do it!" but we won't explain what you're not supposed to do. 

What's the point of saying X is forbidden if you don't say what X is? What's forbidden? The prohibited activity is a placeholder waiting for a definition. Is like warning people not to cross an invisible line. "Don't cross that line!" What line? Where's the line? 

The Magisterium issues an authoritative prohibition on lying without issuing an authoritative definition of the prohibited activity. No compact definition will have the specificity required to rule out every conceivable scenario. 

So even if you wish to obey Rome's prohibition, you must figure out for yourself what the prohibition actually means or entails. The definition of lying must be supplied by something outside the Magisterium. By fallible, inconclusive, incomplete philosophical reflection. 

Incidentally, this generates a parallel problem for Scripturalism. According to Scripturalism, the Bible is the only source of knowledge. So how does a Scripturalist define a lie? Invoking the coherence theory of knowledge is inadequate because, even if we grant the coherence theory of knowledge, that's at best, a necessary rather than sufficient condition of a lie. Even if every lie is a contradiction, every contradiction is not a lie. The definition of a lie is more specific than a general theory of knowledge. So the definition of lying is underdetermined by the coherence theory of knowledge.