Whose Question, How Big?

Whose Question, How Big? September 1, 2015

Fr. Dwight Longenecker warns Protestants about the seriousness of converting to Roman Catholicism:

Ask why you are considering the Catholic Church. If you’re just church shopping you still have a long way to go. The big question is authority. If you have come to believe that the Catholic Church really is the fullest expression of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and that the Holy Father is the God-appointed successor of Peter, Christ’s apostle on earth, then get yourself into the Catholic Church as soon as you can. Everything else will follow.

But what if humans face an even bigger question, such as the one Paul heard from the Philippian jailer — namely, what must I do to be saved? If Fr. Dwight is a conservative Roman Catholic, he might respond that someone must be saved by becoming a member of the Roman Catholic Church since there is, according to older formulations, no salvation outside the church that Christ founded.

But that is not exactly how he puts it because ever since Vatican II and the bishops’ recognition that Protestants are “separated brothers,” the ban against Protestantism has been lifted and now salvation is possible outside the Roman Catholic Church.

Protestants however put the “big question” differently. Here‘s how the Orthodox Presbyterian theologian John Murray put the question that sixteenth-century Protestants put to the Western church:

The basic question is: How can man be just with God? If man had never sinned the all-important question would have been: How can man be right with God? He would continue to be right with God by fulfilling the will of God perfectly. But the question takes on a radically different complexion with the entrance of sin. Man is wrong with God. And the question is: How can man become right with God? This was Luther’s burning question. He found the answer in Paul’s Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, that we are justified by faith alone, through grace alone . . . .

It is to be acknowledged and appreciated that theologians of the Roman Catholic Church are giving a great deal of renewed attention to this subject, and there is a gratifying recognition that “to justify” is “to declare to be righteous”, that it is a declarative act on God’s part. But the central issue of the Reformation remains. Rome still maintains and declares that justification consists in renovation and sanctification, and the decrees of the Council of Trent have not been retracted or repudiated. . . .

Renovation and sanctification are indispensable elements of the gospel, and justification must never be separated from regeneration and sanctification. But to make justification to consist in renovation and sanctification is to eliminate from the gospel that which meets our basic need as sinners, and answers the basic question: How can a sinner become just with God? The answer is that which makes the lame man leap as an heart and the tongue of the dumb sing. . . . Why so? It is the righteousness of God by faith of Jesus Christ. This is not God’s attribute of justice, but it is a God-righteousness, a righteousness with divine properties and qualities, contrasted not only with human unrighteousness but with human righteousness. And what his righteousness is, the apostle makes very clear. It is a free gift. . .

When Paul invokes God’s anathema upon any who would preach a gospel other than that he preached, he used a term which means “devoted to destruction”. It is a term weighted with imprecation. . . . To the core of his being he was persuaded that the heresy combated was aimed at the destruction of the gospel. It took the crown from the Redeemer’s head. It is this same passion that must imbue us if we are worthy children of the Reformation. . . (Collected Writings, vol. 1, 302-304)

Of course, as a Protestant who puts the protest in Protestantism, I’m biased. But it does seem to me that the question Murray (and Paul) asks is a lot weightier than the one Fr. Dwight asks. The answers also result in remarkably different apologetics. Roman Catholic apologists invariably celebrate the church while Protestants defend the work of Christ. Maybe Protestants get the question wrong. But it is the question that anyone should ask before leaving Protestantism for Rome or vice versa. It also helps that praising God rather than fallible men is the outcome of Protestant understandings of salvation.

Image by James Anderson


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