Posted on 05/19/2007 1:45:39 PM PDT by Frank Sheed
Friday, May 18, 2007 Lutheran professor of philosophy prepares to enter Catholic Church
Dr. Robert Koons, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, will be entering the Catholic Church next week following several years of considering the teachings and history of the Catholic Church. In a post over at Right Reason, he writes:
Several weeks ago, I learned through a mutual friend that Frank Beckwith was intending to return to the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, Frank learned that I myself have been moving in the direction of Rome for the last several years. I am very pleased to be able to announce that I intend to be received into the Church on May 26th, at St. Louis King of France parish in Austin. My own story is quite different from Frank’s, although our reasons for entering the Church of Rome are strikingly parallel.
I was baptized through the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod, and I have been an active member of the church body ever since. As a Lutheran, I’ve never thought of myself as “Protestant”, nor have I ever embraced the kind of extreme sola-scripturism that has been much in evidence in responses to Frank’s announcement. I always recognized that the Scriptures are themselves the foundation of, and very much a part of, a divine Tradition. Although I believed that only the Scriptures were infallible, I nonetheless assigned great weight to the ‘rule of faith’ established by the continuous tradition of teaching by the Church, and as reflected in the writings of the Fathers and the decrees of Councils. Insofar as I accepted a form of ‘sola scriptura’, it took the form of insisting that all doctrines must have their source in the Scriptures as interpreted by the Church, or in the universal practices and teaching of the early church. This is the only sort of “sola scriptura” principle that can hold up to logical scrutiny, since the Scriptures themselves provide no definition of the canon and no clear statement of any sola-scriptura principle (both of these can be found only in the Fathers and Councils). Extreme sola-scripturism is, given these facts, self-refuting.
How, then, could I have remained Lutheran? I did so because I believed that the late medieval church (in the form of both the Scotists and the nominalists like Ockham and Biel) had distorted the doctrine of salvation or “justification”, embracing a kind of “Pelagian” error: that is, the notion that human beings can save themselves through the exercise of unaided human reason and will. I still believe this to be so (as do many, if not most, contemporary Roman Catholic theologians). I also believed that the Church erred in its brusque condemnation of Luther’s early protests (again, a view I still hold), and that the Council of Trent solidified a kind of apostasy from the true faith (this is where my current view departs from my former one). I believed that the teachings of the church popularly known as “Lutheran” or “Evangelical”, as codified in the sixteenth century Book of Concord, constituted the defining characteristic of the one Catholic Church in its fullness, in continuity on all essentials with the teachings of the Church from the first century until at least the twelfth. The logic of my position was a simple one: the modern Roman Church clearly embraced an erroneous doctrine of justification, which nullified its otherwise strong historical claim to continuity with the apostles (especially on the matter of ecclesiology, the theory of the Church), depriving modern Christians of any good reason to embrace late-medieval and modern developments in Roman Catholic doctrine (including the immaculate conception and papal infallibility).
Those of you who know more about theology and the history of theology than I did then can easily see how untenable a position I held (although I think this untenable position is one still held by many, if not most, thoughtful Lutherans and Reformed Christians). My confidence in this position was shaken by three blows: (1) new scholarship (primarily by Protestants) on Paul’s epistles, which raised profound doubts about the correctness of Martin Luther’s and Phillip Melanchthon’s excessively individualistic and existentialist reading of Paul’s teaching on justification by faith, (2) the fruits of Lutheran/Roman Catholic dialogue on justification, expressed most fully in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1997, that greatly clarified for me the subtlety of the doctrinal differences between the two bodies, and (3) a more thorough exposure to the writings of the early Church fathers, especially those considered most “evangelical”: Chrysostom, Ambrose, and (above all) Augustine of Hippo. I began to realize that many Lutheran and Protestant polemicists have been guilty of two fallacies: a straw-man version of contemporary Roman Catholic teaching, and a cherry-picking of quotations from the Fathers, ignoring the undeniable contradiction between the teachings of those Fathers, taken as a whole, and the one-sided version of the faith-alone doctrine on justification embraced by the second generation of the Reformation (especially Martin Chemnitz). The Joint Declaration and the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church aided me in giving a closer and more charitable reading to the anathemas of the Council of Trent (which I still believe to be have been written in an unprofitably provocative way).
Read the entire post, as well as Dr. Koons 94-page essay on justification (PDF document).
Posted by Carl Olson on Friday, May 18, 2007 at 09:28
Nice suit, fascinating ears.
I've been a Roman Catholic for 50 years, and I never heard of that being issued from the Roman Pontiff on down the line ...
That doctrine must issue from the straw man Church which exists in the realm of the imagination.
If any Catholic thinks they can get themselves to heaven, they must have spent their lives snoozing through the Liturgy of the Word:
Thomas said to him, "Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?"
is this guy elca?
"I was baptized through the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod, and I have been an active member of the church body ever since."
Measure twice. Cut once.
elca...do you know what it is?
Sure do.
The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) is the eighth largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and the second-largest Lutheran body after the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic Ping List:
Please ping me to all note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of interest.
Do you think TEC would refuse them?
Although they might refuse the St. Looey Jebbies on artistic grounds, because if it's one thing Piskies are proud of, it's their music. And it is good. Only reason we stayed in that church as long as we did, other than sheer inertia and fear of the unknown . . . .
The world would be a better place if they had realized they should have been actuaries. Now it's too late.
I think Koons would agree that his reference to a kind of pelagianism is “semi-pelaginianism” best stated in the phrase, “do your best and God will do the rest” which appears to have been the late medieval framework of Roman Catholic theology.
No serious Protestant scholar has ever said Rome was fully pelagian—and Pelagius was condemned by the Church in the time of Augustine, after all. (Semi-Pelegianism, which says while works do contribute to salvation, grace is absolutely necessary, a middle-way between Augustine and Pelagius, was also condemned later in the fairly obscure Councils of Orange of AD 529). The whole treasury of the saints/penitential system though does seem to contribute to the idea that one must work off the penalties of one’s own sins.
I find it very hard to believe a Lutheran, Missouri Synod (very conservative) scholar would not ever consider himself a Protestant...but in any event his logic about his joining the Roman church (no, “conversion” is not the right word....ask Koons when he became a Christian...) to me seems more cogent than Beckwith’s.
LOL! But don’t actuaries have to have some ability to think?
They have very high-powered calculators.
Neither Beckwith nor Koons are Theological scholars. Both Beckwith and Koons are philosophers, which mean that their focus has been on the work of man rather than the work of God.
I have two Francis Beckwith books and I have read dozens of his articles and his references to Plato and Aristotle and Kierkegaard are legion whereas his references to scripture are scant and often non-existent. I suspect you would find the same with Koons. Birds of a feather...
*************
Heh. Now we're talking something I can understand. :)
I understand hops, barley, malt and ethanol. And also NFL football...(not that scoreless kind they play in Europe; One-Nil and all that; tiebreakers; penalty flops, killing your mate for a team...ugh!).
F
When I saw the title of this thread, I thought at first it might have been about you.
As your prize you win a week's worth of James White rants and a "Berean Beacon" special thread on how the Catholic Church is in bed with Islam, written by ex-Catholic priest, Richard Bennett.
Coming your way any day now.
Koons my be a Prof. but not sure he understands Luther, and LCMS.
He spoke of the monk Ockham of the medieval church who does not play into LCMS views.
The person who took some of Ockham’s views cents. later was Nietzsche.
Ockham was a brilliant heretic, a dangerous combination. His heretical school of thought, now known as Nominalism, is very subtle, very dangerous and now accepted mainstream modern academic dogma.
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