[af_vet_1981]

(Jaroslav Pelikan, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1959), pp. 51-52)

Did you know that when you appealed to this Lutheran pastor by a book he authored in 1959 that he converted to Orthodoxy in 1998 ? For most of his life Pelikan was a Lutheran and was an ordained pastor in that tradition. In 1998, however, he and his wife Sylvia were received into the Orthodox Church in America at the Chapel of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York. According to family members (with some mild dislike of the conversion), his conversion followed his meeting Pope John Paul II. Members of Pelikan's family remember him saying that he had not as much converted to Orthodoxy as "returned to it, peeling back the layers of my own belief to reveal the Orthodoxy that was always there."[3] Delighted with this turn of phrase, he used it (or close variants) several times among family and friends, including during a visit to St. Vladimir's for Divine Liturgy, the "last before his death."[4]

Nevertheless, Pelikan was still ecumenical in many ways. Not long before his own death, he praised John Paul II in an article in the New York Times when the pope died in 2005:

It will be a celebration of the legacy of Pope John Paul II and an answer to his prayers (and to those of all Christians, beginning with their Lord himself) if the Eastern and Western churches can produce the necessary mixture of charity and sincere effort to continue to work toward the time when they all may be one.[5]

[boatbums]

Did you know that when you appealed to this Lutheran pastor by a book he authored in 1959 that he converted to Orthodoxy in 1998 ?

Why should that matter? Did he change his mind about what he wrote or rescind any of it? I never heard he had. His move to the Orthodox didn't change that what he said was true.

How are you coming on that research into finding dogmatic Roman Catholic statements on justification by faith and works prior to Trent? Your diversionary tricks won't work, you know.