Mark,
You have been hanging out with Baptists too long. When you respond to the assertion, “Men may be really saved, by that grace which doctrinally they deny; and they may be justified by the imputation of that righteousness which in opinion they deny to be imputed,” with an Amen, you reveal more than you know. When you add an exclamation point, it’s tmi.
But in all seriousness, I wonder why you are not concerned about precise affirmations of justification by faith alone. Does your implicit affirmation of Reformed catholicity also include theological sloppiness (or flattening)? For instance, is this a statement that we should greet with the warm fuzzy embrace of Reformed ecumenism?
The exclusive ground of the justification of the believer in the state of justification is the righteousness of Jesus Christ, but his obedience, which is simply the perseverance of the saints in the way of truth and righteousness, is necessary to his continuing in a state of justification.
Or how about this one?
The righteousness of Jesus Christ ever remains the exclusive ground of the believer’s justification, but the personal godliness of the believer is also necessary for his justification in the judgment of the last day.
I wonder too if your eclectic quoting from historical sources is a Protestant version of the brick-by-brick mentality that is now afflicting Roman Catholicism:
. . . the strongest criticism of the brick by brick mentality is that it assumes that the Supreme Pontiffs have some ‘grand plan’ to restore the Church. It necessitates that we believe in some sort of supreme insight the popes have into the current crisis, some lofty vision of how to solve our current problems that we mere mortals are not privy to. Remember Benedict XVI’s “Marshall Plan” for restoring the Church? Remember how we were supposed to find coherence in the gibberish of our current Holy Father by “reading Francis through Benedict”?
This is really the terrifying crux of the matter – my dear friends, believe me, there is no plan. There never was a plan. John Paul II did not have a plan. Benedict XVI did not have a plan. Francis sure as hell does not have a plan.
Did JP2 and BXVI occasionally do wonderful things? Of course. Does Francis occasionally say something orthodox? I admit it seems to have happened. But to the extent that John Paul or Benedict or even Paul VI made some truly good moves, it was absolutely not because they had some sort of “master plan” of how to fix the crisis; rather, the opposite was in fact true. Have you ever noticed that the good things about JPII and BXVI were always erratic and mixed in with many negatives as well? In the past I have called John Paul II a “mixed bag”; all the post-Vatican II popes have been mixed bags. This is because John Paul II and Benedict were sincerely conflicted men, torn between a strong, pious pre-Conciliar tradition they cherished nostalgically, but also committed intellectually to the post-Vatican II reforms.
After the Council, when the Church was in free-fall, neither pontiff really knew what to do. They had no plan to solve the crisis they both helped create. Neither seemed to be able to reconcile their pre-Conciliar formation with their post-Conciliar experience. At the best, they seemed to have believed in some sort of vague synthesis of the traditional thesis with the progressive antithesis. Thus occasionally they did something friendly to tradition while other times working to undo it; occasionally they threw traditional Catholics a bone and other times tossed a bone to liberals; sometimes they displayed great care for Catholic Tradition while other times their disregard for it was appalling and devastating to faithful Catholics. I don’t think they ever knew how it was going to work out. John Paul II knew that the liturgy of the Eucharist had to be celebrated with reverence, but he had also committed himself to a particular form of evangelism which required things like the scandalous World Youth Day masses, the animist masses in Togo, etc. Benedict XVI, author of Dominus Iesus, certainly understood the salvific uniqueness of Jesus Christ, yet he also remained committed to a program of interreligious dialogue that brought about Assisi III and gave implicit recognition to Assisi I and II, again scandalizing the faithful.
While the conservatives bent over backwards trying to explain how all these actions were coherently orthodox and the sedevecantists coherently heretical, the fact of the matter is that there was no coherence to these actions at all. The reason Catholics disagree so vehemently about reconciling these contradictory actions is because the pontiffs themselves did not know how to reconcile them. At most they seemed to have shared a vague optimism that tradition and novelty existing side by side would somehow reconcile themselves over time.
You may think that analogy is overdone. I sure hope it is. But you don’t get to questions about marriage overnight. It may actually begin with openness to many ways of articulating and understanding church dogma.
Stay in touch.
Old Life 