Posted on 02/22/2012 9:50:47 PM PST by darrellmaurina
I’m not an eucumenist either. But I am against constantly revisiting the old Reformation issues also, with an aim to fortifying the walls. Catholics and Evangelicals comes to an agreement to disagree on the central question of justification. As a Catholic, I like to point out that John Wesley pretty much came to the same point two hundred years ago. Looking at the struggle between the Calvinists and the Arminians, he just chose to punt, because the differences were intractable. He shared the English distaste for Rome, although he had almost no personal knowledge of Catholicism. Colson does and has pretty much said, that we differ profoundly, but recognize the good will of others who will make good alllies in our war with the common enemy.
You deny to Santorum the right to say what you obviously believe? That aside you miss the point: He says that liberal Protestantism is a wreck. Karl Barth said that 90 years ago. So did Bonhoeffer. But Santorum also has in mind that liberal Catholicism is also a wreck. He has had a lot of experience dealing with Catholic politicians in Congress, and he knows how they think, which is not with the mind of the Church and not with the mind of Christ. Liberal Catholicism,like liberal Protestantism, is utterly pelegian. Once upon a time, this was not true. But certainly it has become so in the last 40 years.
Absolutely. There are still some old time Protestants out there that hate Catholics and vice versa. It's certainly not a universal axiom anymore.
Newt has changed dramatically. Here are some FR links about his conversion.
Newt Gingrich, a “John Paul II Catholic”
Newt Brings Gaelic Fury To The GOP Race (some personal family history)
Newt Gingrich Attacks Fashionable Anti-Catholic Bigotry
Newt Gingrich: What Kind of Catholic Is He? [Born Lutheran, Turned Baptist, Now Catholic]
Newt Gingrich: America’s Next Catholic President?
Clemson Palmetto Poll finds Gingrich (38%) momentum growing, most S.C. GOP voters still uncommitted
Gingrich Threatens GOP's Chance to Nab Independents
The Evangelical Case for Newt Gingrich
Gingrich Represents New Political Era for Catholics
Gingrich Represents New Political Era for Catholics [ecumenical}
Newt Gingrich on Catholicism and JPII
Why Newt Gingrich Converted to Catholicism
Exclusive: Newt Gingrich Opens Up on Catholic Conversion and Embracing 'Overt Christianity'
Newt Gingrich on his conversion to Catholicism
Gingrich Keeps Quiet on Catholic Conversion (received into Church over the past weekend)
Exclusive: Newt Gingrich conversion details; plans release of JP2 documentary
Gingrich to Become Catholic During Easter Season
The Newt Evangelization: Gingrich to become Catholic
I'm going to “hold my fire” on that issue because what I say could get me into a great deal of trouble. Jim Robinson has asked that we not “bash” Gingrich and the statements I would make about his conversion to Roman Catholicism would not be in accord with that request. We're conservatives, we believe in private property, and owners have the right to set the rules for how their property will be used.
For whatever it's worth, I've read enough about Gingrich's personal faith and repentance to believe that it may very well be sincere.
My decision on which candidate to support for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination was made only after a **LOT** of internal questioning.
The only Protestant left in this race is Ron Paul, a man who says his personal faith will not affect his work as president. That makes him unacceptable to me, though I am very much aware that he has personal ties with a number of people in the right wing of my own Calvinist circles and I'm not at all sure that his libertarianism did not develop after personal interaction with theonomists like Gary North. I might be able to support a Mormon under some circumstances, but not a flip flopper like Mitt Romney who cannot be trusted to be consistently pro-life, especially on the critical issue of appointing Supreme Court justices.
By contrast, both Gingrich and Santorum say they have a rather strongly traditional Christian worldview and regard America as being in direct conflict with militant Islam.
That's important. Both men are on the right side of the culture war. The question is whether Gingrich or Santorum would be better leaders of the culture war, and I think a reasonable case can be made for either man. I think Santorum would do a better job in fighting the culture wars domestically, but if we end up with a President Gingrich, the Democrats may very well find out to their horror that he's going to lead America on a new crusade against Islamofascism.
That would not be a bad thing in my book — the Islamic radicals have already declared war on Western civilization, and while we can probably work with moderate and liberal Muslims, the Islamofascists must be defeated if our civilization is to survive.
The Roman Catholic church's statements on justification are quite definitely anti-Pelagian, and for that, we can commend the Catholics for being consistent with their history. If my memory is correct, both Michael Horton and John Gerstner have said that when debating non-Reformed evangelicals, they sometimes pulled out official doctrinal statements of the Roman Catholic Church without identifying where they come from, asked Arminian evangelicals if they could agree with those statements, and got told that the official Roman Catholic statements were “too Calvinist.”
Obviously modern Roman Catholicism is not Calvinist or even Jansenist — St. Augustine lived long ago and far away. But when I run into fundamentalists who are totally and unalterably opposed to cooperation with Roman Catholics, I sometimes find that their own views on justification look more like semi-Pelagianism than like Arminianism.
I am most emphatically not a Roman Catholic. I know what Catholicism is and have definitely and deliberately rejected it. Having said that, the level of theological and historical knowledge present in modern evangelicalism is a real problem, and too many evangelicals have become Pelagians or at least semi-Pelagians who advocate doctrines of salvation which are much worse than those of Rome.
If we're going to object to Rome we need to know why we object to Rome, and not start advocating doctrines of human autonomy which all sides would have rejected at the time of the Reformation.
62 posted on Thursday, February 23, 2012 4:25:13 PM by RobbyS: “Liberal Catholicism,like liberal Protestantism, is utterly pelegian. Once upon a time, this was not true. But certainly it has become so in the last 40 years.”
61 posted on Thursday, February 23, 2012 4:16:59 PM by RobbyS: “Catholics and Evangelicals comes to an agreement to disagree on the central question of justification. As a Catholic, I like to point out that John Wesley pretty much came to the same point two hundred years ago. Looking at the struggle between the Calvinists and the Arminians, he just chose to punt, because the differences were intractable. He shared the English distaste for Rome, although he had almost no personal knowledge of Catholicism. Colson does and has pretty much said, that we differ profoundly, but recognize the good will of others who will make good alllies in our war with the common enemy.”
Cajetan, the Cardinal who examined Luther, was the age’s leading Thomist. What intrigued me what an article I once read about him, which had it that what he opposed Luther and might have had him killed, nonetheless saw merits in his views, and in the Reform view in general. He even proposed an overture to the Protestants. He was of course himself a reformer. Luther seems to have had but the most superficial knowledge of Thomism, which Cajetan was in fact trying to revive as a living teaching. He and the Cardinal had this in common: each rejected nominalism. Fact is that first-rate intellects recognize one another. Which is why Calvin ascended so quickly: his opponets knew they were striking fire against flintn
The article, by the way, I am unable to find again. Just happened to pick it up in a library while whiling away the time. So can’t verify/disprove what I remember.
I would also counter that those who do consistently watch tend to be the more hard core activists who will reach out to the folks they know in their networks and movement might come from that area.
Some activist movement. Under 5 million in a population of 350 million. What a powerhouse. People are done with these debates. The MSM asks questions no one cares about and the candidates play gotcha. In my opinion, no one won last night. There is scant coverage anywhere and no memorable lines came out. When all is said and done, it will be like last night never happened in this election.
There's a lot of that, BTW, in the liberal response to Newt Gingrich. A capable and dangerous opponent, once recognized as such, will draw fire.
The liberal narrative is, of course, that Republicans are either 1) bitter clingers to God, guns, and traditional morality who have been left behind by the inevitable progress of American culture and revel in their ignorance born out of a disguised jealousy, or 2) cynical demagogues who use the language of religion and tradition to manipulate the masses to gain power for their own ends, not because they believe the rhetoric they use.
It's easy to portray a lot of Republican conservatives as ignoramuses. That narrative simply isn't true, but there's enough truth in it that those who have a predetermined agenda can find examples to “prove” their prejudices.
Newt Gingrich doesn't fit that mold. He's acknowledged even by his enemies as usually being the smartest man in the room. Precisely because he's smart, he's recognized by the liberals as being dangerous to their goals and draws a tremendous amount of fire on other issues from people who know they can't refute his ideas in fair debate.
In that context, I want to give you a compliment. Very few people, even active churchgoers, would have any idea what you mean by nominalism, Thomism, etc. The article by Maureen Dowd shows the depth of the ignorance of basic Catholic doctrine in educated circles in America — someone like at her level of elite media ought to have at least some idea of the Seven Deadly Sins before she took up her pen to write about religion. While anyone can make a mistake, something like that shows less about her and more about American cultural ignorance of religion in general.
The issues involved in the Reformation have been grossly simplified at the popular level — i.e., high school history books, the mass media, fiction, and the movies. The average American often has no idea that the Reformation was anything more than Luther's objection to gross immorality in the Roman Catholic Church of his day. That's nothing but nonsense: Both Luther and Calvin understood that it is a Donatist heresy to split a church because of immorality, and both made very clear in their writings that they would never leave a church because of immorality.
Add in the agenda-driven deliberate misrepresentations of the Reformation, for example, the Marxist interpretation of Protestantism as an early bourgeois revolt against the agrarian feudal establishment, or people who look at Luther's biography and think he rejected authority because he was beaten and abused by his father (never mind that was typical for virtually all German boys of his era) — and it's surprising that Americans know anything at all about the issues in the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-reformation.
The central issues in the Reformation were none of those things, but rather such issues as salvation by grace alone, the sole authority of Scripture rather than church tradition or ecclesiastical authority, the nature of what happens in communion, whether the Pope as an individual or the institution of the papacy in general is Antichrist, and liturgical issues of what it means to properly worship God according to His Word.
I wish more people like Dowd would take the time to educate themselves about religious matters before writing on the subject. Their ignorance of a subject they don't care about enough to take seriously would be bad enough, but articles like hers show that she doesn't even understand religion well enough to intelligently criticize it. She wouldn't tolerate an ignorant statement by a Republican politician about a subject she's studied, but apparently she feels free to write about things she doesn't understand and doesn't care to learn about.
The only good thing about that, using military terms, is that when your enemy both underestimates you and misunderstands your capabilities, you have a significant chance of using his ignorance against him to his hurt.
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