I have been working on a sequel to my essay “Catholic and Protestant.” In that essay I argued that the Anglican Church, contrary to the types of Churchmen who eschew one or the other of these labels, should embrace both, defining Catholic as that which belongs to all the ancient Churches since the earliest Christian antiquity and Protestant by the two fundamental truths of the Reformation, the final authority of the Scriptures as the Word of God and the freeness of the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ which can only be received by faith. The sequel, which I have given the title “Catholic not Roman” will concentrate more closely on how the errors of Rome rejected in the Reformation were distinct to Rome and late innovations rather than belonging to all the ancient Churches since the earliest times. The death of California pastor, seminary president, and Bible teacher John F. MacArthur Jr. this week has prompted me to first address the objection that has been raised to a point I made in my first essay. That point was that it is wrong to describe the recovery of the Pauline doctrine of justification in the Reformation as a recovery of the Gospel because the truths St. Paul himself identified as the Gospel he preached (that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of the eyewitnesses he enumerated)[1] were never lost by the Church and are confessed to this day even by Rome in the ancient Creeds.
There was a point behind this point and that is that there is a hierarchy of importance to Christian truth. The truths that are the most important are the Catholic truths. These are the truths confessed in the ecumenical symbols of the faith – the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds, and the Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Symbol. That these outrank justification by faith alone in terms of importance is acknowledged by the formularies of each of the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation. Our Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 acknowledge it by placing the Catholic truths in the first eight articles (Article VIII is the reception of the ecumenical symbols) and the Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580 places the three ecumenical symbols at the start before any of the distinctly Lutheran confessions.
Indeed, I can hardly think of a better way of making the point than how the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 makes it. This is one of the Three Forms of Unity that the Reformed Church acknowledged as its basic formularies at the pan-Reformed Synod of Dort in 1618-1619. Its twenty-second question asks “What, then, is necessary for a Christian to believe?” The answer is “All that is promised us in the Gospel, which the articles of our catholic, undoubted Christian faith teach us in summary.” The next question asks what those articles are and the answer is simply the text of the Apostles’ Creed. The twenty-fourth through fifty-eighth of the questions and answers probe deeper into the meaning of each of the simple assertions of the Creed. It is only then in the fifty-ninth question which asks “What does it help you now, that you believe all this?”, that is, the faith confessed in the Apostles’ Creed, that justification by faith alone, the topic of questions fifty-nine through sixty-four is raised.
It should not require an appeal to the
Protestant confessional formularies, however, to make this point. According to the doctrine of justification by
faith alone it is faith in Jesus Christ
that is the hand with which a sinner receives everlasting life and the
righteousness of God freely given in Jesus
Christ. It is therefore, by the
doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, more important to believe in
Jesus Christ, to believe what is confessed about Him in the faith of the
ancient symbols, than to believe in the doctrine of justification by faith
alone itself.
Consider what the Scriptures
themselves teach us about the content of saving faith. The object of saving faith is, of course,
Jesus Christ. The object of faith is the
answer to the question of Who is
believed. The content of faith is the
answer to the question of what is
believed. St. John tells us at the end
of the penultimate chapter of his Gospel “But these are written, that ye
might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye
might have life through his name”[2] The predicate about Jesus in this verse
contains two assertions placed in apposition to each other so as to identify
them with each other. The Christ is the
Son of God, and the Son of God is the Christ.
Each term brings its own connotations to the overall concept. Christ is the Greek word corresponding to the
Hebrew Messiah. It literally means
Anointed One, and the anointing primarily referred to is that of the kingship
of Israel. Priests were also anointed in
the Old Testament and Jesus as the Christ is the High Priest after the order of
Melchizedek and in one instance a prophet was anointed in the Old Testament and
Jesus is the Prophet that Moses predicted God would send. First and foremost, however, the Christ or
Messiah is the promised heir to David’s throne Who would establish the Kingdom
forever. That the Christ/Messiah would
be the Saviour not just of Israel but of the whole world is indicated by the
very first prophecy found of Him in the Old Testament in God’s judgement on the
serpent in Genesis 3. The Christ,
therefore, is the Saviour Who God had promised He would send the world since
the Fall of Man. Jesus as the Christ is
the fulfilment of those promises.
What it means for Jesus to be the Son of God is established
in the first verse of the same Gospel.
The Word was in the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was
God. This Person St. John identifies as
the Word (Greek Logos), is eternal since He was there in the beginning with God
and is Himself God. St. John’s use of
the word Logos/Word here, like the phrase “In the beginning” points back to
Genesis, since in the second verse he says that is through the Word that
everything that was made was made. In
Genesis 1 God speaks (“Let there be light” for example) all of Creation into
existence. The Word is identified as
Jesus in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel after which the relationship
between the Word Who is God and the God Whom the Word is with is spoken of as
that of Father and Son. In a few places
St. John modifies “Son” with the Greek word rendered “only-begotten” in the
Authorized Bible. This expression indicates
that Jesus is God’s Son in a way no one else is. All humans and angels are sometimes spoken of
as God’s sons by right of creation.
Christians are God’s children by adoption. Jesus, however, is the only natural Son of
God, the kind of Son Who shares the nature of His Father. That this does not mean there are two Gods is
the significance of Jesus’ saying “I and my Father are one”[3] and St. John’s Gospel also
identifies the Third Person Who shares in the unity of the Godhead with the
Father and Son, the Holy Spirit or Comforter.
The words with which St. John identifies the content of
saving faith are familiar from elsewhere in the Gospel records. They are identical with the confession St.
Peter made at Caesarea Philippi in response to the question addressed to Jesus’
disciples “but whom say ye that I am?”[4] Jesus’ immediate response to St. Peter’s
confession was to say that St. Peter was blessed, that this revelation had not
come to him from “flesh and blood” but from the Father, to declare that He
would build His Church which the gates of hell would not overthrow on this rock,
and to give St. Peter the keys.[5] This marked the point where Jesus began
teaching His disciples that He would suffer and be crucified and rise again the
third day.[6] These are, of course, the events that make up
the content of the Gospel as preached by St. Paul. That Jesus revealed them in advance to His
disciples upon St. Peter’s confession that Jesus is the “Christ, the Son of the
Living God” establishes a connection between the two. For Jesus to be the “Christ, the Son of the
Living God” means to be He Who was crucified for us and rose again the third
day. The end or purpose of St. Paul’s
proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus died for our sins and was buried and rose
again the third day was that those who heard would believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God. This was also
the end or purpose of the Gospel Jesus Himself preached, the content of which
was that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.[7] This content pointed to faith in Jesus as the
Christ, the Son of God because what the Kingdom of Heaven being at hand meant was that the promises of it had been fulfilled because it was present in His Own
Person, the promised Christ. Jesus
preached this Gospel to the Jews who were anticipating the coming of the Christ
and the Kingdom of God. St. Paul preached
the Gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ to both Jews and Gentiles
because it revealed what it really meant for Jesus to be the Saviour, to be the
Saviour of everybody from the bondage of sin which has afflicted the whole
world since the Fall rather than a political deliverer of a single nation.
There is one other prominent confession of Jesus as the
Christ, the Son of God and that occurs earlier in St. John’s Gospel in the account of the raising of Lazarus in the
eleventh chapter. It is the confession
of St. Martha of Bethany in response to Jesus’ words “I am the resurrection,
and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”[8] St. Martha’s confession was the only possible
response for someone who believed these words.
Only the Christ, the Son of God could truthfully say He could guarantee
resurrection and everlasting life to all who believe in Him.
My point, once again, is that what St. John identifies as
the content of saving faith – that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and
what St. Paul identifies as the Gospel – that Christ died for our sins, was
buried, and rose again from the dead the third day – are all confessed in the
three ancient ecumenical symbols of the faith.
It is therefore a gross exaggeration of the important of the doctrine of
justification by faith alone to say that its formulation in the Reformation was
a recovery of a lost Gospel. The Roman
Church, as corrupt and in serious error as she had become by the sixteenth
century, still confessed as she confesses to this day, these ancient symbols.
This does not mean that justification by faith alone is not
important. It is a truth taught in the
Scriptures. The claim of the Roman
apologists that it is only mentioned when St. James denies it[9] is most kindly described
as simplistic. One could just as
simplistically respond that the claim is not true because Jesus said (to the
ruler of the synagogue seeking healing for his daughter) “Be not afraid, only believe”[10] and that since this
appears twice and comes from the mouth of Jesus Himself it negates the verse in
St. James’ epistle. A more serious
answer would be to point out that since the Roman Church has re-iterated her
official belief in the inerrancy of the Bible at least on matters of doctrine
and morals in the second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and her 1992 Catechism she is not free to choose St.
James over St. Paul but must find a way to affirm both. It is insufficient to point out that St. Paul
does not use the word “alone” or “only” as it is more accurately rendered in
the Authorized Bible[11] because St. James
specifies “by works” thus including the very thing excluded by name in St.
Paul. The question, therefore, is which
of the two writers explains the other.
The answer is quite clear. There
is nothing in the Jacobean epistle which could be understood as saying “St.
Paul said this in Romans and Galatians, but what he meant is this, which does
not contradict what I am saying here.”
St. Paul, however, includes just such an explanation of St. James at the
beginning of his argument for justification by faith without works in the
fourth chapter of Romans.[12] His explanation is that justification by
works, such as is affirmed by St. James, is “not before God.” St. James, therefore, by the authority of St.
Paul, was not talking about the righteousness of God which is given in Jesus
Christ to all who believe in Him apart from works.[13] This is also evident by taking note of what
is missing from James 2:14-26. Such
words as “justified”, “faith”, and “works” are common to both this passage and
Romans 4, as are the Old Testament references.
The word “grace”, therefore, is conspicuous by its absence from the
passage in St. James.
Grace is the key concept here. St. Paul doesn’t just assert that
justification is by faith and not works he gives an explanation as to why this
is the case. He writes “Now to him that
worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that
worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is
counted for righteousness”[14] and later “Therefore it
is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to
all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is
of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all.”[15] Grace has a number of connotations, including
the love of God revealed in His blessing His creatures, the act of God blessing
His creatures, the blessings themselves, and even the thanks offered back to
God for His blessings.[16] When St. Paul says that justification – or
salvation in all of its aspects for that matter – is by grace, he is saying
that it is a free gift. That is why it
is by faith and not by works. If it were
by works it would not be a gift but a reward, payment, or wage. Faith, by contrast, is not something offered
in exchange or something that merits reward, but merely receives what is given.
This is a very important truth and I have not the slightest desire to diminish its importance. It is possible, however, with any truth to exaggerate it and when this is done that truth becomes distorted. That is the very nature of heresy – the exaggeration of a truth in such a way that other truths are denied and the exaggerated truth is distorted into error.
Consider the basic heresies the Church
contended against in the early centuries.
Sabellianism[17] exaggerated the unity of
God to the point of denying the Threeness of the Persons of the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. Arianism, the heresy
that the first two Ecumenical Councils addressed,[18] was a pendulum swing in
the opposite direction that stressed the distinction between the Persons to the
point of denying the fundamental unity in being of the Father and the Son and
so posited that the Son was a lesser, created, god.[19] The orthodox response stressed the unity of
being between the Father and Son and so the full deity of Jesus Christ but even
this could be exaggerated as it was in the teachings of Apollinaris of Laodicea
who taught that the Divine Logos took the place of the human nous (mind or reason) in Jesus thus
denying that Jesus' humanity was complete.
The Cappadocian Father St. Gregory Nazianzus expressed the orthodox
response “That which is not assumed is not redeemed” and the second Ecumenical
Council condemned Apollinarism.
Nestorius of Constantinople stressed the distinction between the deity
and humanity of Jesus Christ in a way that compromised the unity of His Person. Nestorius’ orthodox opponent was St. Cyril of
Alexandria whose orthodox response was itself exaggerated by Eutyches of
Constantinople in a way that erased the distinction between the natures and fused
them into one.[20] In the fourth ecumenical council, the Council
of Chalcedon, a supplement to the Nicene Creed was produced that defined the
orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union of Jesus Christ – that the Son, Who
is eternally God of one nature with the Father and Holy Spirit, in taking to
Himself true humanity in the Incarnation, remained the One Person He eternally
was and is but with two natures that remained distinct being neither confused,
divided, changed or separated. The monk
Pelagius stressed human moral responsibility to the point that he denied the
hereditary taint of Original Sin and the need for God’s grace. The heresies of monothelitism and
monoenergism condemned at the sixth ecumenical council[21] were variations of the
error of Apollinarism.[22]
If the unity of God could be exaggerated into a heresy
(Sabellianism) and the deity of Jesus Christ could be exaggerated into a heresy
(Apollinarism) then by all means justification by faith alone can be
exaggerated into a heresy and those who elevate it above the Catholic truths of
the ancient symbols of the faith by saying that its re-formulation in the Reformation
was a recovery of the Gospel are at least in danger of doing just that.
There is a particular school of evangelicalism that clearly
does this. Note that in this context by
“evangelicalism” I mean what was called “the new evangelicalism” in the 1950s
when it began as a kind of softer fundamentalism although the “new” or “neo”
was eventually dropped by everyone except those who continued to claim the
label “fundamentalist” for themselves.
By softer fundamentalism I mean less militant and separatist. The leaders of this new evangelicalism also
claimed that they were more academically and intellectually respectable than
the old fundamentalists although I have seen no evidence that would convince me
that they were more so than the contributors to The Fundamentals[23]
and certain books that were published about the time I was doing my
undergraduate work in theology rather laid waste to the idea.[24] By the 1970s it was evident that the
doctrinal drift the old fundamentalists warned would happen in the new evangelicalism
was indeed taking place.[25] In response to the doctrinal, moral and
intellectual shallowness of the broader evangelicalism a school of conservative
evangelicalism arose around the 1980s and 1990s that called for a renewed
commitment to standards. This school
tended to draw its inspiration primarily from the Reformation and the
second-generation Calvinism of the English Puritans.
The way these evangelical leaders treated the doctrine of
justification by faith alone was very interesting. They ran it up the flag pole and demanded
that everyone salute it. If someone did
not loudly and publicly affirm it his evangelicalism and even his Christianity
would be suspect. No similar allegiance
was required for all of the tenets of the ancient symbols and no wonder. These leaders were almost to the man
Nestorians. This was most evident in
their rejection of the honourific Mother of God for the Blessed Virgin[26] although in the case of
the late R. C. Sproul it was also expressed in an ill-conceived diatribe
against Charles Wesley’s wonderful lyric “Amazing love, how can it be, that
Thou my God shouldst die for me.” Some
of them including the late John F. MacArthur Jr. taught Incarnational Sonship,
the heresy that Jesus was not the Son of God prior to the Incarnation but
became the Son of God in the Incarnation, although MacArthur did recant this
early in the new millennium after teaching it for over twenty years, something
that cannot be said of “cults” expert Walter Martin who taught the same heresy.[27] They demanded allegiance to justification by
faith alone while themselves teaching serious heresies concerning more
important Christological and Trinitarian truths. Allegiance was all they demanded for
justification by faith alone, however, not comprehension or understanding. When John F. MacArthur Jr’s The Gospel According to Jesus was
published[28],
it came with glowing endorsements from John Piper, James Montgomery Boice, R.
C. Sproul, et al., and even an introduction from J. I. Packer. Perhaps these Calvinists were too busy
cheering MacArthur’s blistering attack on the Dallas Seminary crowd to notice
that he still essentially subscribed to Dallas theology himself with regards to
the worst elements of that theology and that he had gutted justification by
faith alone of all meaning by redefining it so that "faith" is unrecognizable as
what is meant by the rather simple concepts of “belief” and “trust” and so as
to include in faith the very thing that the Reformation doctrine excludes. One Calvinist who did notice this was John W.
Robbins[29] whose scathing review of
this awful book is a must read.[30]
This school of evangelicalism both exaggerated the doctrine
of justification by faith alone by treating it as more important than such
basic truths as the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ and the Unity of the Person
of Christ and distorted the doctrine beyond recognition by redefining faith to
mean something other than “belief” and “trust.”
On both counts it is guilty of heresy.[31]
[1] 1 Cor. 15:3ff.
[2] Jn. 20:31. Authorized Bible.
[3] Jn. 10:30.
[4] Matt. 16:15.
St. Peter’s confession is in verse 16.
[5] Matt. 16:17-19.
After the Resurrection the keys were given to the Apostles’ collectively
Jn. 20:23.
[6] Matt. 16:21.
[7] Matt. 4:17, Mk. 1:14-15.
[8] Jn. 11:25-26.
St. Martha’s confession is in verse 27.
[9] Jas. 2:24.
[10] Mk. 5:36, Lk. 8:50.
[11] The underlying Greek word is an adverb not an
adjective.
[12] Rom. 4:1-2.
[13] That St. Paul explains St. James rather than
vice versa only makes sense considering the apparent timing of the
writings. Although Galatians is
relatively early in St. Paul’s corpus, Romans indicates the time of its writing
as during the journey to Jerusalem that culminated in St. Paul’s arrest. In the book of Acts this is the time period
of the 20-21 chapters. This is
approximately 57 AD. The Epistle of St.
James, however, was most likely written before the Council of Jerusalem in 50
AD. The reason most New Testament
scholars think this is that the epistle, written by the man who presided at the
Council of Jerusalem, is addressed to a Church that does not seem to have
incorporated the Gentiles as of the time of its writing and takes no account of
the various issues that the Church had to deal with as a consequence of the
incorporation of the Gentiles.
[14] Rom. 4:4-5.
[15] Rom. 4:16.
[16] This is why thanking God before a meal is
called “saying grace.” This double usage
of the same word for God giving and man returning thanks indicates the range of
meaning of the words used in the original Scriptural Hebrew and Greek, as well
as the Latin word from which the English “grace” is derived (the Latin
expression that is the equivalent of our “Thank you” is “Gratias tibi ago”). The
Greek word for grace is charis. Note how this is the main part of the
compound word that is the traditional name for the Sacrament of the Lord’s
Table, Eucharist. Eucharist means
“Thanksgiving.”
[17] Also known as Patripassionism in the early
centuries, today it is more commonly called modalism. It has been revived in Oneness
Pentecostalism. The feminist theology
that replaces Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer”
in order to get rid of gender-specific terminology for God is also a move
towards Sabellianism because these terms are not the names of Persons but
denote functions or roles.
[18] First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), First Council
of Constantinople (381 AD), these are the Councils that gave us the
Niceno-Constaninopolitan Creed, more commonly called the Nicene Creed.
[19] This heresy has been revised in the teachings
of Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, whose followers are the
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
[20] The heresy known as Eutychianism or
Monophysitism. Whether those who were
accused of teaching this heresy were guilty or just misunderstood is a matter
that historians debate as is the case with Nestorius. The ideas that are called Nestorianism and
Eutychianism, however, depart from the orthodox truth of the Hypostatic Union
in opposite directions in a manner rightly condemned, regardless of whether or
not the condemnation of those whose names they bear was historically justified. Nestorianism and Eutychianism were the
subjects addressed by the third and fourth ecumenical councils, the Council of
Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) respectively.
[21] The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681
AD). The fifth ecumenical council had
been the Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD) which was more about
reaffirming and clarifying the decisions of the previous councils than anything
else. It did condemn the writings of
older theologians, primarily Theodore of Mopsuestia (who died shortly before
the Council of Ephesus) although the errors were for the most part one’s that
had already been dealt with. The seventh
ecumenical council, the Second Council of Nicaea (787) was the last council
received as ecumenical before the Great Schism – and thus the last true
ecumenical council. It condemned
iconoclasm, which has more to do with practice than doctrine, although there
was a doctrinal element. In this case
the error was less an exaggeration of a truth than a failure to see one,
namely, that Incarnation meant that what God stressed to Israel in Deuteronomy,
that at Sinai they had heard the voice of God but not seen His similitude,
could no longer be said under the New Covenant because God had become visible
by assuming humanity as expressed by the Lord Himself in the words He addressed
to St. Philip in John 14:9 “he who has seen me has seen the Father.”
[22] Monothelitism denied that Jesus had a human
will. Monoenergism was the idea that
everything that Jesus did in both of His natures was done through the same
divine energy.
[23] A. C. Dixon, Louis
Meyer, R. A. Torrey eds. The
Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, 12 volumes (Chicago: Testimony
Publishing Company, 1910-1915), since 1917 published as 4 volumes.
[24]David F. Wells, No Place for Truth, or, Whatever Happened to
Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1993) and Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).
[25] See the criticism of such in Harold
Lindsell The Battle for the Bible
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976) and Francis Schaeffer The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).
[26] The denial that Mary is the Mother of God is a
denial that Jesus is God. Attempts to
evade this, by saying for example, that she was the mother of His human nature,
reduce to nonsense. The mother-son
relationship is a relationship of persons not natures. While it is obvious that Mary gave birth to
Jesus in His humanity and that He did not get His deity from her (Anabaptist
heresiarch Menno Simons denied that His humanity came from her), Her Son is
God, making her the Mother of God, which is essentially the meaning of the
phrase St. Elizabeth uses of her, “mother of my Lord” in Luke 1:43. The sixteenth century Reformers, who all had
a High Mariology, would be appalled at the direction evangelicalism has taken
since their day.
[27] That so many evangelicals
who did not teach Incarnational Sonship themselves nevertheless defended
MacArthur from the charge of heresy when he taught it reveals just how poor a
grasp of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine they had. The Holy Spirit is identified in the Gospels
of SS Matthew and Luke as the Agent of Jesus’ conception. If Jesus Sonship is derived from the
Incarnation this would make the Holy Spirit His Father. This confuses the Persons of the Father and
the Holy Spirit ala Sabellianism.
Furthermore, if Jesus was not the Son prior to His Incarnation, the
Father was not the Father prior to the Incarnation, because for Him to be the
Father requires that He have a Son.
Since the Father is eternally the Father, the Son is eternally the Son,
precisely as is confessed in the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Symbol.
[28] John F. MacArthur Jr. The Gospel According to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988).
[29] John W. Robbins was to Gordon H. Clark what
Greg Bahsen was to Cornelius Van Til.
[30] https://www.trinityfoundation.org/
journal.php?id=193
[31] It also tended to view
justification by faith alone as being opposed to the sacraments as means of
grace. The sacraments as means of grace
is Catholic and not merely Roman, being the doctrine of all the ancient
Churches. That this truth is not in
conflict with justification by faith alone can be illustrated by the fact that
in the giving of a gift there are two hands involved, the hand of the giver and
the hand of the receiver. The sacraments
are the hand of the Giver (God working through His Church), faith is the hand
of the receiver.
