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The Pre-Vatican II Catholic Church’s Stand on Abortion
As sort of an aside to The Elephant in the Room on Baptismal Regeneration, this, from Farrell’s Parish Catechism:
Is abortion always a mortal sin? Abortion–willfully causing the death of an unborn baby–is always murder, even when suggested or demanded by a surgeon for any reason whatsoever.
Abortion is the murder of the innocent unborn infant. Abortion also renders the Baptism of the infant impossible; therefore the baby can never get to heaven. Permission from the bishop to forgive this sin must be obtained by the confessor
before he can forgive the sin of a Catholic who knowingly and willingly causes or helps cause an abortion.When Paul VI–yes, that Paul VI–set forth Humanae Vitae in 1968, people acted like it was a surprise and a change in the Church’s position. That wasn’t the case; Paul VI oversaw many changes in the Catholic Church (most notably the Novus Ordo Missae) but this wasn’t one of them. That also includes contraception; you can read it in his Parish Cathechism.
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The Elephant in the Room on Baptismal Regeneration
I’ve been thinking about posting on this topic, but, in their inimitable way, North American Anglican has posted this. Like many things in Christianity (vernacular liturgy being an important example,) Anglicanism has wrestled with many things it inherited from Roman Catholicism long before the Catholics did, and this is one of them. The core of the article linked to above is that the idea of baptismal regeneration is, in the Anglican tradition, equivocal, to use a good Thomistic term. And unfortunately that’s not unusual.
Let’s start with the starting point, i.e., what they inherited from Roman Catholicism. I’ll pick a couple of catechisms that I just happen to have on hand. Let’s start with the catechism of Joseph Deharbe, S.J. This is from the Sixth Edition (1908,) although earlier editions date back to at least 1876. His definition of baptism is as follows:
What is Baptism? Baptism is a Sacrament in which, by water and the word of God, we are cleansed from all sin, and re-born and sanctified in Christ to life everlasting.
He is quick to sharpen his definitions as follows:
Why do you say that ‘in Baptism we are cleansed from all sin?’ Because in Baptism original sin. and all the sins committed before Baptism, are forgiven.
Is also the punishment due to sin remitted? Yes; the temporal as well as the eternal punishment is remitted in Baptism.
Let’s jump ahead a century to Walter Farrell’s, with which I was received into the RCC. This is from the 1955 edition:
What is Baptism? Baptism is the Sacrament which cleanses you from Original Sin and personal sin, too, if you are sorry for these latter, and gives you the life of grace, making you a child of God, a brother of Christ, a member of His Church.
He doubles down on those who neglect to baptise their infants:
Is it a serious sin to neglect to baptize a baby? If you neglect the Baptism of your infant you commit mortal sin. A baby who dies without Baptism cannot enter heaven and will never see God.
Unbaptized babies will be free from suffering and will probably enjoy a certain peace and happiness in the next world, but will not have the vision of God.
Farrell’s cathechism was revised in 1970, after Vatican II, and the second quotation was modified as follows:
Is it a serious sin to neglect to baptize a baby? If you neglect the Baptism of your infant you commit mortal sin. It is extremely doubtful that unbaptized infants will go to heaven.
Here we see a shift in Baptismal theology, one which evidently Farrell’s catechism is drug “kicking and screaming.” The “elephant in the room” of this whole debate is that, as anyone who has read Dante’s Inferno knows, the Catholic Church taught through the Middle Ages and down to Vatican II that unbaptised infants would end up in Limbo because the principal purpose of baptism was to wash away the effects of Original Sin, a concept set forth by Augustine and which has become standard theology in the West. This explains the urgency regarding the baptism of infants in traditional Catholic practice.
Ending the teaching that Limbo exists only shifted Limbo from the afterlife to this one. If there is no eternal penalty for being unbaptised, what’s the point? It was here that Roman Catholicism has shifted the emphasis from the eternal benefit to the temporal one, by elevating baptism as the initiation into the church and the graces that come from being baptised. This has led to a great deal of the swelling rhetoric that we hear now on the subject, not only from the RCC but from Anglo-Catholics and Affirming Catholics alike.
Anglicanism wrestled with this problem from the start, since it wisely realised that Limbo had no Biblical warrant. The result, as the North American Anglican article notes, is that there was at least a bifurcation in thought on the extent of baptismal benefit and the real meaning of the term “baptismal regeneration.”
I think that the major loss in this whole debate–which has been going on for half a millennium now–is putting the eternal consequences of baptism front and centre rather than diverting the discussion to the temporal ones. Roman Catholicism’s answer was wrong but it was an answer, and that’s more than we see from those both in the RCC and Anglican/Episcopal worlds who have tried to pick up the pieces since.
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Frank Gough: Another Sad Story with Palm Beach Roots
The ACNA has yet another alleged sex abuser on their hands. as you can see above,
His start in life is interesting, to say the least:
Gough grew up in Palm Beach County. His mother died when he was young and his father worked 18-hour days. Gough, the grandson of wealthy Palm Beach socialites, began to rebel. At the age of 10 he started doing drugs. By 17 he led a motorcycle club and sold drugs.
It’s possible that I knew (or knew of) his grandparents, or that he had spent time at Bethesda. But his story is illustrative of two things I have learned in life.
The first is that starting out or ending up in high places doesn’t guarantee that you have character or moral superiority. One thing I have found out the hard way in getting “off the island” is that people really believe that the wealthy have both, which has been a bane of evangelicals getting this country “back to God.” I think the recent populist tilt in American politics represents the dawning of the realisation that this isn’t always the case, but old ways die hard…
The second is that the ACNA should realise that people with activity such as this person is accused of can be found in lots of places, as conservative churches could have told the ACNA from the start. (Full disclosure: I am on the board that deals with moral failure in ministers in my own church.) The blogger of a living text isn’t optimistic of the ACNA’s track record in dealing with problems like this. Instead of throwing shade, anyone in the ACNA who would like some overview of how we deal with people like this should visit this website and I’ll be glad to discuss this.
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Reformed vs. Re-formed: A Synopsis–North American Anglican
I did my best to follow this back and forth, but it wasn’t easy. For me, however, the key point finally came here:
The crux of this dispute is the nature and substance of the English Reformation. The basic facts of what occurred during the English Reformation are generally agreed upon, but its larger significance and bearing on Anglican identity remain contested. To mention a few concrete examples of such disagreements, on Sutton’s understanding, Reformed Continental influence was minimal; the “specific Protestant Evangelical and Reformed” character of the English Reformation was confined to the short reign of Edward VI;[1] and “the Homilies such as the one ‘On Peril of Idolatry,’ were never fully enforced nor considered to be doctrinally binding in the Church of England.” Historical judgments inform both normative and factual judgments about contemporary Anglican theological identity, and if agreement on the import of the relevant history cannot be reached, then the resulting divide over the character of Anglicanism will be difficult to overcome indeed.
With that in hand:
- A big part of the problem is that “Reformed” these days is equated with TULIP Calvinism or one of its variations. I think that was a serious weakness in Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000; he is evidently of the conviction that, outside of Calvinism, there is no Reformed religion. But, as I’ve pointed out before, the BCP doesn’t support that for the English Reformation, neither does Article XVI. The earliest Continental influences on the English Reformation were Lutheran, not Calvinist. Cranmer definitely wanted a “Reformed” type of Christianity but not in the sense we say that today. Behind much of the struggle for the “soul of England” in the subsequent century and a half was that very issue.
- Tied to the whole topic of whether a church is Protestant or not is whether we accept the Roman Catholic Church’s basic view of itself as an active mediator between God and people. I think that many in the Anglo-Catholic community implicitly accept this without thinking through the implications. Again the BCP accepts the power of “binding and loosing” but severely restricts the church’s choices in implementing that power. Roman Catholicism goes much further than that, at least these days.
- I think fights over how many councils a church accepts is an exercise in futility. We’ve had churches reject ecumenical councils since Chalcedon, and although I don’t agree with them they’ve certainly written their history vis a vis the Muslims (who themselves can be seen as the logical conclusion of Nestorianism) in blood, especially of late. The Roman Catholics keep going on ecumenical councils since Nicea II, and of course since Vatican I the “infallible” Pope has really taken centre stage. As I said in my Book Review: Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000, “…the Catholic position on unity was the same as U.S. Grant’s to Simon Bolivar Buckner—no terms but unconditional surrender.”
As long as Anglicans continually try to harmonise their Christianity to anyone else other than the Scriptures and the Fathers, they will remain a waystation to other expressionions of the faith rather than the sui generis expression that it is.
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If They’re Going to Make it the Gulf of America…
Trump’s “proposal” to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” brings to mind many things. One of them is this chart, put out by our government in 1967, showing it as the “Gulf of Mexico” (which would be altered on things issued by the U.S. government if this came to pass):
This was issued in the era when the Gulf was the centre of my family business’ offshore oil activities, which is yet another issue (and really a more important one) that Donald Trump will have to deal with.
But let’s consider something else: the Gulf itself, which is a mediterranean (small m) type of sea. This has been understood for a long time and was discussed by Amadeus Grabau in his Principles of Stratigraphy, first published in 1913:
The land-locked mediterraneans are the most typical of this kind, and by some they are regarded as the only true mediterraneans. Examples of these are the Roman mediterranean (the Mediterranean of geographers; in reality, a double one, the western descending to 3,151 meters off the coast of Sardinia, and the eastern to 4,404 meters south of Greece) ; the Black Sea, an extreme type with a maximum depression of 2,244 meters ; the Red Sea, 2,271 meters ; and the Mexican mediterranean, or Gulf of Mexico, 3,809 meters.
Since we have our own mediterranean sea and plan to rename it for ourselves, it is only fitting that ours should have something that has made That Other One famous: rivieras. Over there we have the French Riviera, the Italian Riviera, etc.. It is therefore important that we officially designate the area between Mobile and Pensacola as the Redneck Riviera.
A few years back a friend from northern Louisiana went over there on vacation, and took exception to me referring to the area as the Redneck Riviera…until she actually went there, after which she said, “It is the Redneck Riviera.”
I rest my case.
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Book Review: Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000
It’s a new year, and for the Church of England it’s time to find a new Archbishop of Canterbury after the disastrous reign of Justin Welby. When Welby was enthroned, there was a great deal of enthusiasm about him. He’s an evangelical, they said; he can fix the problems of heterodoxy that plague the Church of England. Personally I never had much confidence in this; I could not see the UK government of the Equalities Act select a truly orthodox Archbishop, and don’t expect one this time around either. Beyond that evangelicalism in the Church of England had already “sold the pass,” and much of that process in the UK—and the US for that matter—is documented in Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000.
It’s a well written and documented account of how a movement with so much rectitude going for it could go off the rails the way it did. Murray writes from a Reformed perspective; like many Reformed people, he works under the assumption that the only way to achieve a truly Biblical state in the church is through Reformed theology. He undermines his own case as the book goes along, as we will see.
Evangelicalism in the Church of England after World War II was a relatively small and homogeneous group with little support from or representation in the upper reaches of the hierarchy, a long way down from the days of J.C. Ryle and others. The idea of a truly evangelical group in any “nominal” church is one that Americans tend to greet with “rofl” but it was there. How it was dislodged from that happy if isolated state is due to forces that, in no small measure, came from this side of the Atlantic.
Getting past his initial (and deserved) swipe at the Germans (and especially Schleiermacher) he starts with the rise of Billy Graham and especially his first London crusade in 1954. Graham’s apparent broad based success, coupled with his outreach to non-evangelical churches and especially non-evangelical elements in the Church of England (including Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher,) was both thrilling to British evangelicals of the time but left others like Martyn Lloyd-Jones flat. Murray doesn’t evidence any awareness of the fact that Billy Graham, Southern Baptist that he was, had taken the peculiarly Baptistic combination of Arminian election with Calvinistic perseverance to its logical conclusion. Many of those who came forward ended up in liberal or Anglo-Catholic (yes, the “unEnglish and unmanly” are back to confuse the issue again) churches, but in such a theological framework once they made the decision it really didn’t matter what happened next.
Coupled with Graham’s impact on British Christian life were several forces at work on both sides of the Atlantic that weakened the evangelical witness.
The first was the desire for academic respectability and success. His special focus is on Fuller Theological Seminary, but he documents the broad effect of the accreditation system on what the seminaries taught and the people who taught there. The introduction of the German PhD system (unsuited for non-science disciplines to start with) shifted the faculty composition from those with pastoral experience to professional academics schooled in German higher criticism, something that had already taken its toll in the Anglican/Episcopal world.
The second was the ecumenical movement, with its forced contact with non-evangelical people and especially Roman Catholics (more about that later.) The ecumenical movement forced evangelicals to put institutional unity ahead of doctrinal assent, which went against the whole concept of church that evangelicals—and even the Church of England in the Thirty-Nine Articles, which it dumped in 1975—had held.
The third—and the one that tied the rest together—was the general push for respectability in evangelical circles. That drove many of Billy Graham’s associations, including the celebrated ones with U.S. Presidents, some of which backfired. Such results should have alerted the Pentecostal and Charismatic people to the perils of such associations, but they have not.
There are three events in the life of the Church of England which Murray points to as crucial in the transition of evangelicals from a Biblical group to a more “comprehensive”—and less Biblical—one.
The first two were the evangelical conference at Keele in 1967 and the one at Nottingham ten years after. In these conferences evangelicals shifted to a more open view of themselves and Christianity. There were warnings at the time of where this was going—and the drifting apart between Lloyd-Jones and J.I. Packer is during this period—but these went unheeded.
The third was the evangelicals’ role in torpedoing the union of the Church of England with the Methodist church in 1971. The evangelicals felt that the Methodists were too liberal and would shift the church to the left, so they made common cause with the Anglo-Catholics and got it voted down. This is a strong evidence of an attitude that was becoming common amongst Evangelicals in that time that liberalism, instead of Roman Catholicism, was the real enemy of true Christianity.
This leads us to the topic of the Catholic Church. Murray, like Bossuet in his exposition of the variations in the Protestant churches, is selective in his choice of topics, devoting most of the chapter to the subject of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together document. A little history before that would have strengthened Murray’s case that the document wasn’t a good thing, and a brief recapitulation of that would be helpful.
It is difficult for Protestants to understand the “wild west” feel of the Catholic Church in the years following Vatican II and during the pontificate of Paul VI. Murray criticises evangelicals for confusing their own concept of becoming a Christian against the Roman Catholic one; what he doesn’t realise is that there was a broad spectrum of Roman Catholics who were having doubts about their own system. That opened up Catholics to things like the Charismatic Renewal, which gave parts of the church a decidedly “evangelical” feel to them. The accession of Pope John Paul II in 1978 signalled a reversion to the “old ways” (which Murray is well familiar with) and the brutal assimilation of groups and people which followed. That led many of us to take our leave, which illustrates something that Murray and other evangelicals frequently don’t get: the best way to get Roman Catholics out of the church isn’t to tell them to leave, but to get them to a direct encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ, and then they’ll “figure it out.”
By the time of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the die was pretty much cast. Had the document stuck with social and political issues, it could have been valuable. By trying to make into a blueprint for ecumenical “progress,” evangelicals discovered what Murray points out (but not in this way,) namely that the Catholic position on unity was the same as U.S. Grant’s to Simon Bolivar Buckner—no terms but unconditional surrender.
Murray doesn’t say much about the Charismatic Renewal and its effect on evangelicalism. He is certainly a cessationist and, although like D. James Kennedy he knows that salvation is more than intellectual assent, he is loathe to see that our encounter with Jesus Christ is both experiential and Biblical, with the latter informing the former. He is silent on the role (if any) of classical Pentecostal churches, which had their own reservations about the Renewal.
So what’s the solution? With all of his Reformed sensibilities and his dislike of “come-out-ism,” he appeals first to the revivals of George Whitfield and John Wesley, which is odd since a) Wesley was more Arminian in his view and b) the Methodist church ended up coming out of the Church of England, in spite of Wesley’s efforts to prevent that event (in England; his approach in the new United States was different.) He’s basically right, and Pentecostal churches—heirs of Wesley—would do well to continue in that path.
The years following the time that Murray documents have seen the sexualisation of the divide between liberal and non-liberal, which have in turn exposed the weaknesses of a movement which Murray documents. The rise of a Justin Welby in the wake of those weaknesses should be seen as inevitable, even if the government had been more conservative. They’ve also had their share of “come-out-ism” (the ACNA is the best evidence of this) and the shift towards the left of the Roman Catholic Church, one facilitated by the uncertain sound from the current Occupant. Perhaps this will be clear sign that Roman Catholicism isn’t the safe haven that some evangelicals thought it was. In any case, although a quarter century has passed since the end of the period the book covers, Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000 is still a valuable resource for a period whose legacy is only now beginning to be understood.
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Book Review: We Believe: An Exposition of the Church of God Declaration of Faith
Thanks to recent events, the whole business of the Church of God Declaration of Faith has become more important. Those of us who teach at Church of God institutions such as Lee University—even when that teaching isn’t theological in nature—are required to avoid teaching that which is contrary to the Declaration of Faith. Our ministers are required to periodically reassert their fidelity to the Declaration. This has essentially made the Declaration a fixed document; that fixture is something that is relatively new to our church.
That being the case, a group of professors at our church’s Pentecostal Theological Seminary have put together an article-by-article commentary entitled We Believe: An Exposition of the Church of God Declaration of Faith. They have done so in a very readable (not always academics’ strong suit) form. When I refer to “the author” or “the authors” in my own article-by-article commentary on the book (which appears below,) I am referring to the author of the specific commentary on the specific article.
With all that, my thoughts on the book are as follows:
- The book’s first chapter is a reflection on the opening statement of the “Declaration of Faith”: We believe. The author takes an approach that echoes the justification for changing the original English translation of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds in the Novus Ordo Missae from “I believe” to “We believe.” He emphasises the communal nature of belief, which should put paid to the endless whining that churches like the Church of God overemphasise the individual and his or her faith. (The Novus Ordo Missae, formulated in Latin, never changed from the singular, but the translation reverted to the original in the last decade. The 1979 BCP does in one way in one place and another way in another.)
- The section on the Scriptures (Article I) puts the Scriptures on the high, inspired plane that they in fact hold. The Scriptures are not an artifact from the past but a powerful, present reality. Any revelation of the Spirit that comes must not contradict the Scriptures, which curtails extremes from both left and right. One interesting thing is that, since the Septuagint was quoted in the New Testament, the author states the “Paul would consider translations to be infused with the Spirit just like the original Hebrew or Greek,” which is a bold statement for someone outside of Eastern Orthodoxy. Another very interesting point is that he manages to get through the whole thing without getting into the issue of inerrancy; his position is that the veracity of the Scriptures is guaranteed by their inspiration.
- Turning to the Trinity (Article II,) the treatment of this difficult subject draws on some basic theology that many today across the spectrum would like to discard. I think, however, that the time has come to re-examine the whole issue of subordinationism, something I do at length in My Lord and My God: A Layman Looks at the Deity of Christ and the Nature of the Godhead. This is especially true in view of the rise of “functional subordinationism,” which I deal with (and is mentioned more than once in the book) in my piece Why Sydney Anglican Subordinationism is Lame.
- On Jesus Christ (Article III) the section starts with the following: “The heart of our faith is not a set of doctrinal statements. The heart of what we believe is a person.” The author also delivers a strong, non-Catholic pushback against a purely judicial view of the atonement, based on the Wesleyan roots of modern Pentecost. He is also uneasy with the Apostles’ Creeds statement “suffered under Pontius Pilate” because it detracts from the reality that all of us shared in the crucifixion of Our Lord.
- With Sin and Repentance (Article IV) we have as straightforward of a presentation on the topic as one could want. It is in some way reminiscent of the gospel presentations that we taught at Church of God Lay Ministries, and uses not only those Scripture verses but also those of the Comfortable Words in the Holy Communion, which additionally speak of the need of repentance after initial conversion.
- It makes sense that a discussion on justification, regeneration and the new birth (Article V) would pick up on the previous two articles. Here the author deals with two topics which Church of God ministers and laity deal with on a routine basis: the idea of unconditional perseverance (even when coupled with an Arminian view of justification) and the relationship between justification and regeneration, where the author uses adoption as a way of relating the two.
- The discussion on sanctification (Article VI) is a much needed clarification on two topics poorly understood by advocates and opponents alike of the whole concept of sanctification after salvation: what “perfection” really means in a Wesleyan context, and whether sanctification is an event or a process (the author posits that it has elements of both.)
- Turning to the related topic of holiness (Article VII,) this section does something that doesn’t happen very often in the Church of God, at least in this country: it avoids an extended discussion of the legalistic way in which the whole concept has been historically applied. Instead he equates holiness to a way of life which is in stark contrast to much of which passes for Christian behaviour.
- I discuss the topics of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Article VIII) and speaking in tongues (Article IX) in my work Born to be Alive: A Pentecostal Layman Looks at the Second Chapter of Acts. I think that the case for modern Pentecost would be strengthened—and given better historical continuity—if Pentecostal authors would make a stronger connection between the Baptism in the Holy Spirit and supernatural gifts and manifestations in general. The history of the church shows that you can have supernatural manifestations without the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, but once you have the Baptism in the Holy Spirit you will have supernatural manifestations. This is necessary in light of a lot of the radical cessationism that passes for “orthodoxy” these days.
- Concerning baptism (Article X) the author goes into a very detailed Biblical explanation of the subject that leans toward a more ordinance view of the subject (as opposed to a sacramental one.) He also gives a rationale for believers’ baptism, which I cover in my post Why I Support the Idea of Believers’ Baptism.
- The authors of the section on divine healing in the atonement (Article XI) waited until the very last to state that we—all of us—are anointed to pray for healing. If there is one thing that needs to be underlined in the Charismatic-Pentecostal world, it’s that “the anointing” is not restricted to just a few. As Bossuet pointed out, if we are Christians, and Christ means “the anointed one” we are anointed.
- The subjects of the Lord’s Supper and foot washing (Article XII) receive good, detailed Biblical treatment, which is a hallmark of the book in general. But, as is the case with baptism, the whole distinction between sacrament and ordinance isn’t really explained, a confusion compounded by the editor’s note at the end of the section and evidently one that goes back to the beginnings of the church. Sooner or later our church is going need to determine which we are doing, especially as it relates to the Lord’s Supper and our general adoption of Bill Clinton’s Eucharistic Theology–It Depends on What ‘Is’ Is.
- It is no surprise that our church takes a premillennial view of the Second Coming of Christ (Article XIII.) Going past that, the author takes the opportunity to include advocacy for a pretribulational view of the Rapture. As the editor’s note at the end points out, it is not necessary to be “pretrib” in order to be in conformity with the Declaration of Faith, something that Dr. F.J. May, a seminary colleague of several of the authors of the book, pointed out many years ago.
- It always amazes me that, in a culture as secular as ours has become, that so many glibly express the hope that someone they don’t like should “burn in Hell.” But the article on the last things (Article XIV) gives a Biblical view to push back against both the vindictiveness of our day and the sappy universalism that has plagued Christian churches in the past and still does today. It serves as a suitable wrap for the book, as this article does for the Declaration of Faith.
We Believe: An Exposition of the Church of God Declaration of Faith is a very nice treatment of a topic that has become important in the life of our church. One thing that would have been nice to include brief bios of all of the contributors, something that would have been useful to the reader and uplifting to the academics. The viewpoint diversity of the various authors—while not without risk for the whole enterprise—helps to make the book reflective of the fact that our church is not a monolith but a gathering of believers, each with his or her own gifts.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 