Category: Other Christians

A reader writes:

Hello JamesJimmy, I have a Roman Catholic friend who was in the process of becoming Lutheran.  After speaking with him regarding our Faith he has halted the process and is interested in understanding the differences between the Lutherans and us Catholics.

Is there a book or some literature out there that in a no-nonsense sort of way can explain the differences ?

One of the first things that springs to mind is the book The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism by Louis Bouyer. It’s a sympathetic look at Lutheranism and Calvinism by Bouyer, who is a convert to Catholicism from Lutheranism.

Bouyer is a real theologian, though, so the book may be a little heady for what your friend is wanting. If that’s the case,

HERE’S A GOOD ARTICLE BY MARK BRUMLEY SUMMARIZING BOUYER’S KEY POINTS.

There’s also a lot of good material over at CATHOLIC.COM.

And if justification is a special issue for him, he might want to check out a copy of my book, The Salvation Controversy, which goes into the subject in detail, along with an analysis of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification that the Holy See signed with the Lutheran World Federation a few years ago.

Hope this helps!

Catholic News Service has a story about the meeting that Pope Benedict had this Wednesday with curial officials about the possibility of reconciling the Society of St. Pius X.

EXCERPTS:

More than 20 heads of congregations and pontifical councils attended the Feb. 13 meeting, which was to be followed up by a similar session in late March. No details of the February meeting were made available by the Vatican press office.

Several Vatican sources said that while Cardinal Castrillon strongly supported a solution based on these points opinions were sharply divided among curial members on any concessions to the Lefebvrites.

One Vatican source who participated in the February meeting of curial heads said he thought the pope wanted to make one big push for reconciliation at the beginning of his pontificate.

"I think it’s now or never for the Lefebvrites. As time passes, an agreement will become much more difficult," he said.

GET THE STORY.

A reader writes:

What do you think of the rumors of an autonomous rite for Anglicans who wish to be in communion with the Holy See? As a former Episcopal priest who came into the church, I have mixed feelings about such an arrangement. I miss some of the accidents of Anglicanism, e.g., the hymnody and the quasi-Tridentine precision of a solemn high Mass the way we did it, but I do not miss the culture of dissent that is so much more prevalent in Anglicanism or the devaluation of theology in practical terms. I am very interested in what you think.

I don’t know that I personally have a lot to say. I’m in support, in principle, of the restoration of other bodies of Christians to full communion with the Catholic Church, and historically this has often been accomplished through the creation of a new "rite" in the Church–or what would more properly be called a new church sui iuris (Latin, "with it’s own law").

If that’s the best way to faciliate the reunion of (some) Anglicans, then I’m for it.

Such matters have to be handled very carefully, though, to ensure that it is a true restoration of full communion and not a papering over of differences.

There are also other risks as well. I was aware of it when a similar effort in the 1990s was underway (claims vary about whether was to be a new church sui iuris or some other kind of canonical structure), and it all fell apart when the former Anglican bishop who would have been the head of the new rite defected from the Church.

"Once burned, twice shy," as they say. The Vatican will need to make very sure of the leadership of the body coming into union. You don’t want to have the spectacle of a grand reunion followed by a new schism of the same people hot on its heels.

It is my understanding that the Anglicans involved in this process may not have the dissident ethos that you mention, though I don’t know if that applies to these bodies as a whole. My
familiarity with the precise theological tenor of these circles is quite limited.

So I don’t know whether the time is right for this, though I hope so. I’d like to see a new church sui iuris added to the Church in my lifetime, but it needs to be done the right way, and there are a number of significant issues to be solved.

For more on all this,

SEE THIS POST OVER AT PONTIFICATIONS, which links to a number of things, including

THIS VERY INFORMATIVE POST AT THE CONTINUUM.

A reader writes:

I have some advice to ask. I have a niece who my wife and I nearly raised after her sister went through some hard times.  During college she met a wonderful young man who was going to study for the ministry and after graduating from College went on to Baptist Seminary where he graduated. He took a church and for a year he struggled as a young pastor to keep the congregation from splitting over a number of old seated issues.

After about a year of attempting to heal a broken church they decided that it was time to return home where they could be closer to family. After moving home, they are having trouble finding a congregation; our nephew has taken a counseling job where he can use his theological and pasturing skills while also providing for the family.

My question is that I have been feeling an intense sense that I should share the stories of many of the protestant ministers who have returned home to Rome but I am concerned that this might not be received in the right spirit. My wife and I are both converts, I converted in High School along with my entire family, she converted prior to our marriage.

Do you have any advice as to how I could start the conversation with my nephew? My sprit feels that there might be an openness on his part. 

I don’t know the young man as well as you, or what your relationship with him is, so my ability to offer advice is limited, but I’ll give you what thoughts I can.

It seems to me that I’d be as simple and direct and non-threatening as possible. I’d say something like:

You know, John, my wife and I weren’t always Catholic. We became Catholic, and it has really meant a lot to us. I know that you have a great desire to follow God, and I think God would want you to investigate whether he wants you to follow him as a Catholic.

It may not be something that you have ever seriously considered before–in fact, you may have been taught a number of things about Catholicism that would have kept you from considering it before. But many people have looked into Catholicism and become Catholic in recent years, including many Protestant ministers.

Maybe the fact that you are now searching for a church shows you that this is a good time to look into it yourself.

If you’re open to it, I’d like to give you this book/tape to read/listen to. If you have questions or want to investigate further, I’d be happy to help point you to resources. You may find that many of the things you have been taught about Catholicism aren’t true or at least that Catholics have a better basis for them than you thought. That’s what many of these ministers found.

I wanted to share this with you because of how much I and my wife care for you and our neice. We’ve found that being Catholic has really meant a lot to us, and I know it would really mean a lot to you and our neice, too.

Then I’d give him Surprised By Truth volume 1 (the purple one) since it is a book of short, theologically-oriented conversion stories, many of them by Protestant ministers who became Catholic. Or, if he wouldn’t be up for a book, I’d give him the tape Protestant Minister Becomes Catholic by Scott Hahn.

If he’s receptive, you may also talk to him about what being Catholic has meant to you and how much you value it.

If he’s an admirer of John Paul II or Benedict XVI (as many Protestants are), you might cite them also as men of great wisdom who have found value in the Catholic faith. You might also consider giving him a copy of Pope Benedict’s new encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, as something that he might find valuable to read.

(Incidentally, if you google "God is love" then Deus Caritas Est is the first thing that pops up. If only B16 were Internet-savvy enough to fully appreciate how cool that is. CHT to SDG for pointing this out to me.)

A copy of the Catechism or the Compendium that will be out at the end of March also could be good.

Don’t load him up with too much stuff all at once, though.

Other readers may have other suggestions, but I hope these help!

A reader writes:

I’m Catholic and have regularly been invited to join a dozen or so Reformed Calvinists for theological discussions while enjoying cigars. The next time we meet the guys want to talk about the Ordo Salutus (the order of salvation). In Calvinism it’s the call, regeneration, justification, adoption, and sanctification – all occur in that specific order. I don’t see anything so neat and tidy in the catechism about such, and I’m not certain if Augustine or Acquinas ever addressed this. I hate to attend the next meeting without a cogent way of explaining the Catholic view. Any ideas?

The Ordo Salutis is a big deal in Calvinist theology. It’s kind of one of their theological calling cards, and they devote a lot of energy to it. That’s the reason that you don’t find something equivalent in the Catechism. Other groups of Christians also don’t focus specifically on tihs concept the way Calvinists do.

For those who may not be aware, the Ordo Salutis (Latin, "the order of salvaion") is a set of stages through which each individual is held to pass on the way to heaven. The order of these stages is fixed and the same for everyone in the Calvinist view, beginning with God’s eternal election of an individual (before he even exists) and ending with his glorifcation in heaven.

Different Calvinists include different steps in the Ordo Salutis, and they debate the details of which steps precede which. They also construct what they perceive to be alternative understandings of the Ordo Salutis based on the theologies of other groups of Chrisitans. They then set about critiquing these alternative orderings. (At your next discussion you may be presented with a "Catholic Ordo Salutis" that they have constructed and want to critique.)

Here is a typical listing of the Ordo Salutis from a Calvinist perspective:

1. election
2. predestination
3. outward call through hearing the gospel
4. inward call to respond to the gospel through God’s grace
5. regeneration
6. conversion (faith & repentance)
7. justification
8. sanctification
9. glorification

Calvinists stress that these stages are not all separated in time. They represent the logical order of what happens in salvation but not always the chronological order. For exmaple, justification and sanctification are held to happen at the same moment in time, but–according to Calvinists–justification is logically distinct from and prior to sanctification.

To back up their understandings of the Ordo Salutis, Calvinists appeal to various biblical texts–usually in Paul.

SEE HERE FOR MORE INFO.

ALSO HERE, ESP. FOR BIBLICAL PASSAGES.

From a Catholic perspective there are several difficulties with the typical Calvinist articulation of the Ordo Salutis.

One that I would point out–though I don’t know that all Catholics would point this out–is that Calvinists frequently press biblical language beyond its limits in trying to come up with a precise Ordo Salutis. Specifically: They assume that the biblical authors are using the relevant terms in univocal senses. That means: They assume that the biblical authors use the same words in the same way all the time, so whenever Paul talks about "justification" in a discussion of salvation he always has to mean the same thing by it, and it is necessarily distinct from–for example–sanctification.

This is a problem because Paul’s language is a lot more complex than that. See the early chapters of my book The Salvation Controversy for a bunch of illustrations. (One to have in your hip pocket for the discussion is the fact that in Romans 6:7 Paul clearly uses the word "justify" in a way that overlaps with "sanctify." What he literally says in Greek in this passage is "He who has died has been justified from sin" but the context is so obviously sanctificational that most translations–even Protestant ones–will render this something like "He who has died has been freed from sin.")

This problem goes to the theological-exegetical method of Calvinists.

The next problem goes to a particular feature of Calvinist theology: Their understanding of regeneration. Calvinists conceive of regeneration as a work of God whereby God makes the person capable of responding to him in faith. Regeneration thus precedes faith, which precedes justification.

Unfortunately, they are just wrong on this one. Regeneration is an impartation of divine life that normatively happens in baptism and baptism (in the case of adults) follows faith. The paradigm for adult believers would thus be: God’s iniative of grace enabling one to respond in faith > faith > baptism > regeneration.

Expect John 3:3-5 to be a central text in debates with Calvinists concerning regeneration. See the stuff from the Fathers Know Best section of the library at Catholic.com to show patristic disagreement (which is unanimous) with the Calvinist understanding of regeneration.

It would be possible to construct a Catholic understanding of the Ordo Salutis. Unfortunately, I don’t have the leisure at the moment to do the heavy lifting needed to do a detailed Catholic articulation, but the core elements of one (for adults) might look like this:

1. God’s initiative of grace enabling an individual to respond to his call.
2. Conversion (faith and repentance)
3. Baptism
4. Regeneration/Justification/Sanctification
5. Glorification in heaven.

When you start wanting to get into more detail than that, though, problems arise.

First, you’ll notice that I have listed regeneration, justification, and sanctification on the same line. That is because God normally does all of these at once in time (which Calvinists will admit in the case of justification and sanctification). I don’t know that one can establish any of them as being logically prior to the others.

Second, between steps four and five there are things that happen, and they do not all happen in the same order. These include things like falling from grace and being restored to it. They also include growth in justification (a concept wholly absent from Calvinist though), and purification in purgatory for some but not necessarily all people.

Third, you’ll note that I don’t have anything prior to step one like election or predestination. This is because the Catholic Church has not mandated a single view of these matters and permits considerably more flexibility than Calvinism does. Thomas Aquinas put election prior to predestination (and love prior to election), but that’s a matter of theological opinion, not something that the Magisterium mandates.

Then you’d have to build in ways of handling the situation of infants who are baptized and baptism of desire situations and baptism of implicit desire, and you see how complex this is all gettting.

We’re now hitting the reason why Catholics (and other non-Calvinist Christians) don’t generally go in for detailed articulations of the Ordo Salutis.

God just doesn’t have a fixed order of how he applies salvation to people. Even if you assign fixed meanings to terms like "election" (and it’s not AT ALL clear that Scripture uses this term the same way in every case), God just gives some people graces at different stages than he gives others.

What you can do is describe, within limits, how God normally does it in the archtypal case, but there just isn’t a "one size fits all" paradim for this in Scripture. Calvinists are wrong to think that there is, and they fail to do justice to the complexity of biblical language and the biblical text when they assume there is.

This is why many non-Calvinist Protestants accuse Calvinists of logic chopping the biblical text on these points.

Now: If you try to explain all this, you’re likely to meet with some stock responses, such as how complex the Catholic Church makes things. There are a number of responses to this, including:

1. Excuse me, but your proposed Ordo Salutis is looking rather complex to me already.
2. Indeed, it’s more complex than it appears, since you have to have an alternate Ordo Salutis to cover the case of elect infants who die before reaching the age of reason.
3. And the existence of debate even in Calvinist circles about the precise sequencing of some steps shows that not every question is settled in your own movement and that different Scriptures can be brought forward to argue different positions.
4. Trying to work out a detailed schema of salvation inevitably is going to result in complexity because of the mysteriousness of searching out God’s ways, which is another way of saying
5. I didn’t make it complex. God did. You’re just not wanting to recognize the true scope of the mystery of God’s action as Scripture presents it to us, and
6. Despite the complexity of a detailed account, the core message of salvation can be boiled down into a very simple form: "Repent, believe, and be baptized." (And, if you need to add: "If you fall into mortal sin then repent, believe, and go to confession.")
7. The Catholic articulation of these matters can thus be presented in very simple, practical form that even a child can understand or it can be presented in all the enormous theological depth needed to satisfy a theologian.
8. If you’re having trouble keeping up with the latter, Friend Calvinist, I’ll talk slower to make it easier for you.

Hope this helps!

Michelle here.

Loma Linda, California, is not quite the same for Adventists as Salt Lake City is for Mormons — more important meccas of Adventism can be found in the Midwest and East Coast — but it is predominantly an Adventist city. I spent some time there over a decade ago and was amused that there was postal delivery on Sunday but not Saturday.

"The city is best known for Loma Linda University Medical Center, where in 1984 doctors performed the world’s first infant cross-species heart transplant: ‘Baby Fae’ was given the heart of a baboon.

"Less known is that the university and medical center are run by Adventists. Loma Linda, home to at least 7,000 Adventists, one of the largest concentrations in the world, has been governed exclusively by church members since it incorporated more than three decades ago.

"Adventism, a conservative Christian denomination, and the church’s holistic devotion to people’s health and spiritual well-being dominate daily life in Loma Linda, where biblical creationism and cutting-edge medicine exist side by side.

"The city has a Ronald McDonald House to shelter the families of ailing children — but no Golden Arches. Most Adventists are vegetarian."

GET THE STORY.

(Nod to Bill Cork for the link.)

Late in 2004, when my father was dying of terminal illness, we managed to have him admitted to the hospice nursing unit of Loma Linda’s Veterans Administration Hospital. (San Diego’s VA did not have any openings.) Despite the difficulties for us in visiting him, we were pleased for him that he could be at the Loma Linda VA because that meant he would have access to Adventist chaplains. The Loma Linda VA had three chaplains, two Adventist and a Catholic priest.

Although early in his stay at the VA Dad did get one visit from the Adventist chaplain and another visit from an Adventist pastor who was a friend of the family, as the end approached the chaplain who responded to my calls for chaplain’s visits was the priest. (I did not request him; I only requested whoever was available.) At the end, it was the priest who visited Dad just before he died and who prayed with us afterwards. I never met either of the Adventist chaplains.

Which goes to show that even in an "Adventist city" I guess it is possible for Adventists to be prepared for death by a Catholic priest.