4 Comments

Ethan C.
September 7th, 2009 | 8:29 pm

Thanks for posting this! But the link to the video is broken.

Stephen M. Barr
September 8th, 2009 | 4:45 pm

The link to video does seem to be broken, but I managed to find it with google: http://www.wheaton.edu/media/cace/penner090903.html

Timothy George made an interesting point about the difference between official Catholic teaching and the understanding that many ordinary Catholics have on such subjects as the relation between faith and works. He was trying to be kind to the Catholic Church, by saying, in effect, “don’t blame the Church’s teaching for what some of her members mistakenly believe.” I appreciate that. And he is no doubt right that there are some ordinary Catholics who fall into the mistake of thinking that we can earn our way into heaven, despite what the Church actually teaches. I have two comments.

The first comment is that Protestant doctrine on salvation is just as liable in practice to crude distortions by the theologically unsophisticated. Here is an example from my own recent experience. Someone to whom I was extremely close died suddenly three weeks ago, and I was in quite distraught, even devastated about it. Hearing this, a very sweet and kind Lutheran friend phoned me up to offer condolences. To comfort me, she said, “He is in heaven now”. I said, “I certainly hope and pray that he is.” She replied with firm conviction, “Oh, we know he is in heaven. IT’s ALL GRACE! It doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t do. Jesus saves us.” She meant well, and I didn’t argue with her. Now, mind you, she had no idea whether the person I was mourning was a Christian believer or had any faith at all (she did not know him, had never met him, and had never even heard me speak about him). She had the sola gratia part down cold, but seemed to have forgotten the sola fide part. Another example: This same dear lady once told me she was for abortion in some cases (such as deformed children). I pointed out to her that the Christian tradition had unanimously taught the wrongness of abortion for 2,000 years. She answered, “Well, I have prayed about the issue, and this is what God has told me.”

My second comment is on the importance or lack of it of works righteousness. Frank Beckwith hit the nail on the head in this dialogue with Timothy George, when he said that “we should be more concerned with getting heaven into ourselves than getting ourselves into heaven.” We should be concerned with the state of our souls. We should be striving for holiness, resisting temptation, doing good works, and trying to please the Lord. Both Catholics and Protestants believe this. There are spiritual dangers on both sides of the path. The spiritual danger of thinking works save us is that we begin to take credit in our own minds for the good we do, forgetting that it is Christ working in us, and thereby become proud — hence St. Paul’s concern “lest any man should boast”. But the danger of the sola fide position is that we may easily become complacent about our spiritual state. It seems to me that both complacency and pride are destructive in the same way: they prevent contrition, repentance, spiritual striving.

As a Catholic, I would venture to suggest that when an ordinary Catholic worries about “not being good enough” and feels that he ought to do more good works, he is not worrying in the first instance about salvation and whether he “has it” or “doesn’t have it”, but simply about his spiritual state. The ordinary Catholic, traditionally at least, saw/sees life as a spiritual struggle that does indeed require spiritual effort — “run the race”, “fight the good fight”, to use St. Paul’s terms. This attitude is easily mistaken by Protestants — and perhaps by many Catholics who lack the theological sophistication to express it with precision — as “earning salvation”. But the people who are in most spiritual danger, it seems to me, are not those who struggle to be holy and to do good works and who are nevertheless always painfully aware of how far they “fall short”. The people in most danger, I suspect, are those who think they “have it made”, whether because they think they have amassed enough good works to make them good people, or because they think Jesus did it all and it is irrelevant to their salvation what kind of people they are.

elder reader
September 9th, 2009 | 7:01 am

Faith without works or works without faith; either one without the other becomes a caricature. Certainly “apart from Him we have no good” and yet we must also do that good that he gives us. None of us is up to the task; therefore it seems unrealistic to deny our need for purification. Rather than discourage us, this offers great hope that God will not abandon us even after death.

J Blogger
October 29th, 2009 | 2:28 pm

Timothy George blurs the distinctions between Christianity and Romanism. He is most probably an uncover Jesuit operating as a Protestant. He has far too much interest in joining with Catholics in religious practices.