Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part Two – Evangelical and Catholic: Part Two of Part Two – Catholic

In the sixteenth century, the Reformers of the Magisterial Reformation, continental and English, did not identify their enemy, the Pope, his adherents, or his doctrines as “Catholic.”

In the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, Article XXII uses the term “Romish” to describe the Doctrine “concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints” which it says is “a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.” Earlier, Article XIX declares that like other particular Churches (Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch are named), “the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” The Church of Rome is never identified with the adjective “Catholic.” The word “Catholic” does not appear in the Articles at all, as a matter of fact, but Article VIII declares that “The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.” The first of these contains the affirmation “and I believe One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” (1) The last affirms the affirmation “The Holy Catholick Church.” (2) The Athanasian Creed (3) or the Quicumque Vult begins by saying “Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith.” (4)

We find very much the same thing when we turn to the confessions of the Lutheran tradition. The Book of Concord (1580), which collects the most important Lutheran confessional statements in a single volume, begins with the aforementioned three ecumenical Creeds. These are followed by the Augsburg Confession, which was addressed to Emperor Charles V in 1530 AD. In this Confession the word “Catholic” first appears in Article XXI, “Of the Worship of the Saints”, not to identify the teaching and practices they opposed, but to say “This is about the Sum of our Doctrine, in which, as can be seen, there is nothing that varies from the Scriptures, or from the Church Catholic, or from the Church of Rome as known from its writers.” Apart from a citation of St. Augustine to the effect that Catholic bishops must not be submitted to if they teach contrary to the Scriptures, all other usages of “Catholic” in this Confession are of a similar nature, denying that the Lutherans have departed from the Catholic Church and Catholic faith. The same is true of the two uses of “Catholic” under the heading “Of Original Sin” in Philip Melanchthon’s Apology for the Augsburg Confession, the two uses under the heading “Of Love and the Fulfilling of the Law”, the two uses under the heading “Of Repentance”, the one use under “Of Ecclesiastical Order”, the one use under “Of Good Works”, and the one use under “Of the Mass.” The three uses under the heading “Of the Church” are simply affirmations of the Catholic Church in accordance with the Creeds. The three times the word “Catholic” appears in the Smalcald Articles, penned by Dr. Luther himself in 1537, it is to rebut the papacy’s claims to headship over the Catholic Church and its identification of the Catholic Church with its own followers. Philip Melanchthon does not use the word “Catholic” in the text of his “Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope” written in the same year as the Smalcald Articles, but it does appear once in an addendum by Johann Brenz, following the signatures, where he says that he has read all the Lutheran Confessional material to date and in his opinion they concur with both the Scriptures and “the belief of the true and genuine, Catholic Church.” In the remaining documents in the Book of Concord – Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms from the 1520, and the Formula of Concord, Epitome and Solid Declaration, from 1577, the word “Catholic” is conspicuous by its absence – “Christian” is substituted for it in citations of the Creed, but it is never used in a negative sense to refer to the papacy.

In the Reformed Church, Article XXVII of the Belgic Confession is entitled “The Holy Catholic Church” and begins by saying “We believe or confess one single Catholic or universal Church.” These are the only times the word “Catholic” appears in the Confession, which concludes its Article IX, “On the Trinity” by saying “And so, in this matter we willingly accept the three ecumenical creeds—the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian—as well as what the ancient fathers decided in agreement with them.”

It is quite evident that for the Magisterial Reformers “Catholic” and “Protestant” were not mutually exclusive terms, and “Catholic” has no negative overtones whatsoever. A rejection of the Roman Patriarch’s claims of exclusive title to the word “Catholic” for those in Communion with him was a key element of Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed theology in the sixteenth century.

This is a remarkable contrast with evangelical usage of the same term in our own day and age. I am using evangelical here, to refer to the subcategory of Protestants whose common identity is based primarily upon a shared experience of conversion which they identify with the new birth spoken of in the New Testament. The change in meaning of evangelical, from its sixteenth century definition based upon the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith to this new, experience-based, definition was the subject of Part One of Part Two. Seventy years ago, evangelicals by the experience-based definition, were all thought to be theologically conservative, at least by the scale that measures theological conservatism/liberalism by willingness to alter theological beliefs to accommodate the presuppositions of Modern rationalist and empiricist philosophy. This is no longer the case. Today, evangelicals include both self-identified fundamentalists, who are archconservatives by the standard of the aforementioned scale, and “liberal evangelicals.” (5) The vast majority of all types of evangelicals, however, now use the word “Catholic” to refer to the Roman Communion. Fundamentalists, railing against the Roman Communion as the “Whore of Babylon” will call it the “Catholic” Church. More liberal evangelicals, arguing for ecumenical dialogue to repair the breach of five centuries ago, will also speak of the Roman Communion as the “Catholic” Church. Conservative evangelical theologians, defending the Solas of the Reformation, usually now refer to the doctrines of transubstaniation, human merit, papal supremacy, etc. as being “Catholic.”

Some might say, and this is undoubtedly true up to a point, that this is the result of a cultural shift towards a paradigm of mutual respect, or at least lip service to the concept, that encourages calling other groups by their own preferred nomenclature. I have many criticisms that I could make about this seemingly innocuous cultural shift but they would be very extraneous to what I am discussing in this essay. My contention here is that whereas sixteenth century Magisterial evangelicalism refused to surrender “Catholic” to the Roman Communion because it regarded its own doctrines as consistent with the Catholic Faith and the traditions of the Holy Catholic Church, contemporary evangelicalism has been willing to surrender the term to the Roman Communion because it does not so regard itself as being Catholic. If both evangelicalisms have been correct in their self-assessment, sixteenth century Anglican/Lutheran/Reformed evangelicalism in its conviction that it was still Catholic, twentieth-twenty first century evangelicalism in its conviction that it is not, then this indicates that the evangelical movement has departed from the orthodoxy of the Reformation, especially its first tier.

With regards to the self-assessment of sixteenth century evangelicals, the Roman Communion, of course, accused them of breaking with Catholic tradition, the Catholic Faith, and the Catholic Church. The doctrine of “justification by faith alone”, that is, that man receives the righteousness of God offered in the Gospel through the sole instrument of believing in Jesus Christ and not by his own works since justification in the eyes of God is entirely a gracious gift of God and not something we earn, for example, the Roman Communion declared to be a novelty of Luther’s, that differed not just with late Medieval corruptions but with Catholic doctrine since the ancient days of the Church. Against their claim it can be observed that a) the doctrine of justification by faith without works was formulated as above by St. Paul himself in the very font of Catholic faith and tradition, the New Testament, and especially the fourth chapter of the epistle to – ironically – the Romans, b) no anathema was pronounced against the doctrine until the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which Council, despite the Roman Communion’s claims to the contrary, was certainly no ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church and lacked the authority thereof, and c) no similar anathema was ever pronounced by the Greek Communion, the theology of which has never included the elements of late Medieval Roman theology against which the Reformers asserted the Pauline doctrine so forcibly, i.e., human merit, the depository of supererogatory works, etc. (6)

In the Catholic tradition, that which had been taught and believed in the Church, from the time of the Apostles and Fathers downward, in all regions and all periods of time, the emphasis had been on sanctification. People are sinful. God is holy. A holy God cannot admit sin into His presence. Therefore, sanctification is necessary before a sinner can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, in the full eschatological sense of that expression. A sinner, admitted into God’s holy presence without having his sinfulness removed and his nature restored from its fallen state to one of perfect holy righteousness, could experience God’s holy presence only as hell, and would make the Kingdom into hell for others by his very presence. Ergo sanctification is not optional but must necessarily be completed before one can be admitted to the Beatific Vision. (7)

The pope and his followers in the Roman Communion maintained that the Protestant emphasis on justification by faith apart from works amounted to a denial of everything in the previous paragraph and separated justification from sanctification. This, however, was a caricature of the Reformers’ doctrine. By saying that justification was the crediting to the believer of his faith as righteousness for the sake of Christ’s completed sacrifice and perfect merit alone and not as a reward for his own works, Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer had no intention of denying the necessity of sanctification or of maintaining that God justified sinners without committing to sanctify them. In St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, upon which they relied so heavily, the Apostle went on from teaching that all are sinners (chapters 2 and 3), who are credited with the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel when they believe on the basis of Christ’s propitiatory death and apart from their works (chapter 4), to magnify God’s grace as being greater and more abundant than human sin (chapter 5), which is no excuse for sin because the union of believers with Christ in baptism unites us with Him in His death and resurrection so that we in His death have died to sin (chapter 6) and the Law, which due to our innate sinfulness, called “the flesh”, is powerless to produce the righteousness it commands (chapter 7), and should reckon ourselves to be alive to Christ in His resurrection and so serve Him in righteousness (chapter 6 again), and while this produces a situation where we struggle against ourselves in this life (end of chapter 7), all who belong to Christ have been given His Holy Spirit Who “quickens” our “dead members”, i.e., provides the power lacking in the Law, and we, with all of Creation, can look forward in a certain hope, to the day when God will indeed complete the work of restoration in us as He promised (chapter 8). The Reformers, by insisting that justification is first and is the foundation upon which sanctification is built rather than the other way around, as the Roman doctrine of a justification that rests in part on the works that are the fruit of sanctification would suggest, did not deny the Catholic tradition and its emphasis but rather, by going back ad fontes to the Pauline order in the source of that tradition, strengthened the tradition by correcting a late error.

What then of contemporary evangelicalism’s self-assessment that it is not “Catholic”?

In the sixteenth century evangelicalism was predominantly Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed, that is, the evangelicalism of Churches that had been reformed by the civil power, with no intention of separating from the Catholic Church, but only rejecting the errors and false practices of the Roman Patriarch who had usurped power far exceeding that granted him in the early centuries. Contemporary evangelicalism, however, is predominantly that of separatist sects, guilty of what has been condemned under the name “schism” since the earliest days of the Church, and which were condemned by the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation when they first appeared. Unlike the Magisterial Reformers, these sects did indeed see the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation as a break from the Catholic Faith and Church, because unlike the Magisterial Reformers, they saw the Catholic tradition as starting, not with the Apostles but with Constantine in the fourth century, and because, also unlike the Magisterial Reformers, they saw the errors of Rome as not being late Medieval, but as belonging to this tradition since the earliest days. This is the same interpretation of Church history held by all of the sects that evangelicals label as “cults”, which are generally anti-Trinitarian groups who have revived ancient heresies like Arianism (Russellism) and Valentinism (Mormonism). While the sects that are part of contemporary evangelicalism have not rejected orthodox Nicene Trinitarianism or Chalcedonian Christology, the contemporary movement has produced many leaders with very defective views of these doctrines. One very prominent evangelical author who passed away three years ago, criticized Charles Wesley’s marvelous hymn “And Can It Be” by suggesting that there are hints of Patripassionism in it, but in doing so crossed the line into Nestorianism. (8) The man who until 1989 was the leading evangelical “expert” on cults, thought of himself as an orthodox Trinitarian but denied the eternal sonship of Jesus Christ, i.e., the doctrine affirmed by all orthodox Christians in the part of the Nicene Creed that goes “the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds…Begotten, not made.” A popular evangelical pastor, seminary president, author, and radio teacher, until about twenty years ago taught the same thing. (9)

We shall, Deus Vult, examine this further in Part Three of Part Two, the final section of Part Two of Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy, in which we shall look at how the predominance of the sectarian mindset in contemporary evangelicalism, as opposed to the sixteenth century evangelicalism, is related to the shift to an experience-based definition of the movement and the shift to following the Roman Communion’s practice of reserving the term Catholic for itself.


(1) This is how this phrase is rendered in the current Canadian edition of the Book of Common Prayer. Most previous editions of the Book of Common Prayer, including the 1662 Restoration edition that all subsequent editions have been based upon and the original 1549 edition omitted the second of the marks of the Church, “holy.” It is still absent in the edition used by the Church of England. According to the Right Reverend John Dowden, nineteenth century Bishop of Edinburgh this is probably due to critical studies of the Church Councils by Jacques Merlin, Peter Crabbe and Bartolomé Carranza published in the decades just prior to the first Book of Common Prayer which maintained that it was absent in the Greek original in the Acts of the Councils. (The Workmanship of the Prayerbook in its Literary and Liturgical Aspects, 1899, pp. 104-106). Whether or not this is the case, it most definitely belongs to the Greek and Latin, texti recepti, of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as recognized by the Eastern and Western Churches respectively. Whatever we might think of the hatchet job the Canadian edition of the BCP has made of the Coverdale Psalter, or the other, strictly stylistic, changes to this clause of the Creed (capitalizing the O in One and dropping the k from Catholick and Apostolick), the re-insertion of “Holy” is clearly an improvement over the 1662 edition.

(2) This is how it appears in all BCP editions of the baptismal Creed, thus, vide supra notwithstanding, the mark of holiness was not eliminated entirely with regards to the Church in the Anglican editions of the Creeds.

(3) Until the sixteenth century it was widely believed that this was written by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth century champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy against Arianism. Then the Dutch theologian Gerardus Vossius argued against this view in his Dissertationes Tres de Tribus Symbolis, Apostolico, Athanasiano et Constantinopolitano in 1642, maintaining that it was probably written in Gaul much later in the first millennium, possibly even the ninth century. In response to the spread of this view, Dr. Daniel Waterland, in a critical look at all of the then-extent manuscript evidence concerning it, argued that it was probably written by St. Hilary of Arles in the early fifth century, prior to the Nestorian controversy (A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed, 1723). Whatever the truth might be about the “Athanasian” it is obviously not properly a Creed in the same sense as the Apostles’ and Nicene, not being in the form of a confession of faith beginning with credo (or credimus) but of an exposition of the content of the faith found in one or both of the other Creeds.

(4) The Canadian rendition is “WHOSOEVER would be saved / needeth before all things to hold fast the Catholic Faith.”

(5) Those who continue to identify as fundamentalists have maintained for the last sixty years or so, that the evangelicals who abandoned the fundamentalist label around the time of E. J. Carnell’s becoming president of Fuller Theological Seminary (1954), the founding of Christianity Today (1956) and the Billy Graham Madison Square Garden Crusade in the New York (1957) and in connection with these events, were even then taking a step towards a more liberal theology. In 1976 and 1984, Harold Lindsell and Francis Schaeffer would each argue from within the evangelical movement that a liberal form of evangelicalism had in fact developed. These works, The Battle for the Bible and The Great Evangelical Disaster respectively, were, as their titles suggest, polemical works intended to sound the alarm against this sort of compromise. The same phenomenon was discussed from a more detached, academic, perspective by George M. Marsden in Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (1995). Since then, segments of evangelicalism willing to adjust their theological beliefs to accommodate postmodernism and deconstructionism, and thus far more liberal than anything these previous writers could have imagined, have arisen.

(6) The closest the Eastern Church came to a “Council of Trent” was the Synod of Jerusalem, also known as the Synod of Bethlehem, in 1672. This Synod did not convene until over a century had passed since the Council of Trent had ended. Its Acts and Decrees are called the Confession of Dositheus, and while Decree XIII rejects sola fide, it is worded as an affirmation of positive belief and not as an anathema pronounced upon those who disagree. There are several anathemas in the Confession of Dositheus, most of these pertaining to practices with regards to icons, although the Calvinist doctrine of reprobation is also so anathematized. The Orthodox Synod and its Confession was not primarily a response to the Reformation, but to the Confession of Faith of Cyril Lucaris that had been published in Latin in Geneva in 1629. Cyril Lucaris, canonized by his own Communion shortly after his death in 1638, had been Patriarch of Constantinople, the highest rank in the Eastern Orthodox hierarchy although what it is to the Eastern Communion is closer to what the Archbishop of Canterbury is to the Anglican Communion than what the Pope is to the Roman. The Orthodox Church in this Synod, felt the need to respond to this Confession because it presented the Eastern Orthodox Faith as being Protestant, affirming, among other things, justification by faith alone and the Calvinist view of predestination. The Synod of Jerusalem distinguished between the Confession and its purported author, maintaining that it was a forgery. Differences of opinion persist about that matter to this day. G. A. Hadjiantoniou in his Protestant Patriarch: The Life of Cyril Lucaris (1572-1638) (1961), as is evident from the title, took the position that the Confession was genuine. At the very least, the Patriarch was far more sympathetic to Reformation doctrines than the representatives of Orthodoxy in 1672. This is the Cyril Lucaris who sent one of his priests, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, later Patriarch of Alexandria, to study at the Anglican University of Oxford, who became a friend and correspondent of the Right Reverend William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and who gave Codex Alexandrinus (or A), the oldest uncial vellum manuscript of the Greek Bible, other than Vaticanus (B) and Sinaiticus (א), to King Charles I. Obviously, even if we take Hadjiantoniou’s position that the Confession was genuine, it would be a gross fallacy to argue that Cyril I rather than the Confession of Dositheus “speaks” for the Orthodox Church as a whole. Nevertheless, the facts that a) the Synod of Jerusalem was very late in the seventeenth century, b) that it was a response to the Confession rather than the Reformation itself, c) that the leading Patriarch of the Eastern Church for most of the first half of the seventeenth century was clearly on much better terms with Protestantism, and that d) there is no anathema on sola fide, demonstrate that it was not so certain in the minds of the East, that the Reformation doctrine was a break with the universal and Patristic tradition, as it was in the minds of those who represented the papacy in the Tridentine Council the previous century. It is also worth noting that the caricatures with which the Roman Communion dismisses the Reformation doctrine, such as that it separates justification from sanctification making it into a kind of paper transaction that creates a fictional righteousness, the Eastern Church traditionally levels at the Western tradition as a whole, from St. Augustine of Hippo onward, and including the papal doctrine as much as the Protestant.

(7) This is the kernel of truth which is to be found deeply hidden away within all the error of the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, rightly rejected by Protestants and the Eastern Church alike. Sanctification, at whatever state it is at when the believer dies, must be brought to completion before admission into God’s Heavenly Kingdom. This much is true, although there is nothing in Scripture or the tradition that is truly Catholic rather than distinctly Roman to support the idea that the process must take place over a very long period of time in a place assigned to that purpose, much less the thoroughly blasphemous notion that there is a treasury of supererogatory works (works above and beyond what God requires of us) that the saints have stored up which can be drawn upon to lessen one’s time there in return for a sum paid to the Roman Church.

(8) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-scylla-of-patripassianism-into.html

(9) Those who maintain that they hold to orthodox Trinitarianism – God is One in Being, but Three in Person, each Person of which is fully God – but reject Eternal Sonship, teach Incarnational Sonship, i.e., that Jesus as the Word was always God but became the Son in His Incarnation. The Holy Ghost, however, is clearly identified as the agent in the Incarnation in the nativity accounts of both St. Matthew and St. Luke. Incarnational Sonship, makes the Holy Ghost into Jesus’ Father. That erases the Personal distinction between the Father and the Holy Ghost, and reduces logically to the heresy of Sabellianism. I addressed this issue at great length here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/05/jesus-christ-eternal-son-of-god.html