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.