Evangelicals and Catholics Together by Charles W. Colson

(New York: Thomas Nelson, 1995), 227

The divisions between us are not the battle of the hour, when hosts of secularists and relativists threaten to sweep away the last trace of Christian truth, thought, and influence from our culture. The controversies that divide us are far less significant than the common threat that confronts us. (38)

Introduction

  • "ECT is a beginning" (ix)
  • "The final test of ECT will be whether it strengthens the church's witness to the gospel of reconciliation" (x, cf. 2 Cor-05)
  • Books influencing ECT include The Naked Public Square, Kingdoms in Conflict, and The Body: Being Light in Darkness
  • ECT authors: "All of the participants evidenced a robust skepticism about 'ecumenical' statements that hedge on important differences. Again and again it was said that the only unity we could seek, the only unity that is pleasing toGod, is unity in the truth." (xii)

ECT Statement: "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium"

  • Opening: "We are Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics who have been led through prayer, study, and discussion to common convictions about Christian faith and mission." (xv)
  • quotes Redemptoris Missio in the second paragraph
  • "As Christ is one, so the Christian mission is one."
  • "Legitimate diversity should not be confused with existing divisions between Christians that obscure the one Christ and hinder the one mission." (xvi)
  • We Affirm Together
    • Jesus Christ is Lord.
    • We are justified by grace through faith because of Christ.
    • All who accept Christa s Lord and Savior are brothers and sisters in Christ.
    • Christians are to teach and live in obedience to the divinely inspired Scriptures.
    • We believe in the Apostles' Creed
  • We Hope Together
    • We hope together that all people will come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. This hope makes necessary the church's missionary zeal.
    • The church is by nature, in all places and at all times, in mission. (cf. Ad gentes)
    • As Evangelicals and Catholics, we pray that our unity in the love of Christ will become ever more evident as a sign to the world of God's reconciling power.
  • We Search Together
    • Together we search for a fuller and clearer understanding of God's revelation in Christ and his will for his disciples.
    • We are not permitted simply to resign ourselves to differences that divide us from one another. Not all differences are authentic disagreements, nor need all disagreements divide.
    • "We note some differences and disagreements..." (the Church, Sola scriptura, ministry, sacraments, Lord's Supper, etc.)
      • What are Evangelical's biggest objections to Catholicism?
      • What is my biggest reason to be Catholic?
      • Catholic Church should have a privileged position in argument based on its history and what it claims? (cf. 199)
    • We can and do pledger that we will continue to search together for a better understanding of one another's convictions.
  • We Contend Together
    • As we are bound together by Christ and his cause, so we are bound together in contending against al that opposes Christ and his cause.
    • Christians individually and the church corporately also have a responsibility for the right ordering of civil society.
    • Poltics, law, and culture must be secured by moral truth.
    • In this country, too, freedom of religion cannot betaken for granted but requires constant attention. We strongly affirm the separation of church and state, and just as strongly protest the distortion of the principle to mean the separation of religion from public life.
    • We will persist in contending in order ot secure the legal protection of the unborn.
    • In public education, we contend together for schools that transmit to coming generations our cultural heritage, which is inseparable from the formative influence of religion, especiallyJudaism and Christianity. Education tor responsible citizenship and social behavior si inescapably moral education.
    • We receive Western culture as our legacy and embrace it as our task to transmit it as a gift to future generations.
  • We Witness Together
    • Bearing witness to the saving power of Jesus Christ and his will for our lives is an integral part of Christian discipleship.
    • That we are al to be one does not mean that we are all to be identical in our way of following the one Christ.
    • In view of the al number fo non Christians in the world and the enormous challenge of our common evangelistic task, it isi neither theologically legitimate nor a prudent use of resources for one Christian community to proselytize among active adherents of another Christian community.

The Common Cultural Task: The Culture War from a Protestant Perspective

Charles W. Colson

  • The culture war is real, and we who believe in the Bible are losing it.
  • The Cultural Crisis: The Assault on Truth
    • We Christians in America now live in a society that has rejected not just Christian truth but any conception of truth.
    • The collapse of truth and the loss of moral criteria threaten to unravel the moral consensus that has enabled us ,in spite of all our differences, to live together in freedom.
    • Christianity's exile from the dominant culture began with the Enlightenment: human reason autonomous from religious revelation should be the basis of social and political order.
    • Pierre Manet: origins of modernism are in Enlightenment thinkers' determination to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic Church.
    • Modernism: truth can be discovered and defined by human reason without the guidance of biblical revelation or church doctrine.
      • This has failed: Reason has not solved all human problems.
    • Postmodernism rejects the modernist ideals of coherency, uniformity, rationality, progress, and conventional morality, while exhibiting and unflinching commitment to radical egalitarianism, subjectivity, and disorder.
      • Without a belief in truth, any culture inevitably descends into decay and disorder.
  • The Consequences of Postmodernism
    • Worship of Power: Stanley Fish for instance argues that all "truth claims" are manipulations of language to achieve power; since there is no truth there is no rational basis for argument.
    • Loss of Cultural Identity and Integrity: loss of truth leads to ideological multiculturalism and deconstruction of Western Culture
    • Loss of Moral Order and Political Consensus (cf. Planned Parenthood v. Casey)
    • The Loss of Liberty: One of the principle lessons of history is that when truth retreats tyranny advances.
  • Beyond the Culture War
    • Culture wars often end in shooting wars.
    • At root, every issue that divides the American people is religious in essence.
  • The Church and Culture
    • The Church must first remember that its principal obligation is not to renew the culture (it is to proclaim the Gospel). When the Church makes culture its first priority, it gets swallowed up by the culture.
    • Christians must have a realistic view of the limits of politics.
    • Our cultural problems are spiritual, intellectual, and moral in origin (not as much political).
    • Christians can expect to be increasingly unwelcome in postmodern culture.
  • Challenges of the Faithful Church
    • Christians must be trained to think biblically so they understand their faith and can defend it against doubt and attack...All Christians need to cultivate a comprehensive biblical worldview.
    • Churches that make demands on their members may well shrink in membership...The Church must put its own house in order. Otherwise, it will have nothing to offer postmodern culture. (cf. 2021-07-03-Faith and the Future)
    • The Chruch must make a powerful apologetic in defense of the truth.
    • Contemporary culture shows that Christianity offers a compelling alternative (cf. 2021-07-03-Faith and the Future)
    • Postmodernists tend to be oblivious to abstract arguments, but they can see and be moved by Christian life.
  • The Evangelical Heritage
    • Evangelicals: commitment to the good news, dedicated to evangelism, have a high regard for the Bible
  • An "Evangelical Catholic"
    • Luther was an "evangelical Catholic". His objections were to (1) apostolization of extra-biblical traditions, (2) divinization of papacy, and (3) obscuring of the doctrine of justification
    • Colson argues that the Reformation provided the basis of democratic capitalism and political freedom in a democratic government.
    • William Wilberforce shows how an individual Christian, through living the love of Christ, can influence and change a culture.
  • The Evangelical Challenge—Ecumenism of the Trenches
    • Evangelicals must neither withdraw from the culture or surrender to it, but engage it with the truth.
    • Evangelicals can learn from Catholics how to think deeply about spiritual truths and moral philosophy and a high view of the Church.
    • Catholics can lean from evangelicals about the value of intense Bible study and the importance of personal faith.
  • Reaching across the Boundaries
    • Mere Christianity: internal controversies are secondary to evangelism; Christians need to present a united front to the world
    • Evangelicals and Catholics have more in common with one another than with the borderline liberals of their own tradition.
    • Christians do not have the luxury of limiting their energies to theological debate.
    • The divisions between us are not the battle of the hour, when hosts of secularists and relativists threaten to sweep away the last trace of Christian truth, thought, and influence from our culture. The controversies that divide us are far less significant than the common threat that confronts us. (38)

      Pointing the Way
  • "We have the same Bible and the same God. We are one!"

Faith, Freedom, Responsibility: Evangelicals and Catholics in the Public Square

George Weigel

The History of an Encounter: Roman Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals

Mark A. Noll

The Unity for Which We Hope

Cardinal Avery Dulles

Crosscurrents among Evangelicals

J. I. Packer

The Catholic Difference

Fr. Richard Neuhaus

  • Characteristics of Evangelicalism: authority and sufficiency of Scripture, redemption through the death of Christ on the cross, personal conversion, and the urgency of evangelism
  • "Unity is God's gift, not our creation."
  • "The problem, indeed the scandal, is that we are united but live as though we were not."
  • The Catholic Church does not claim monopoly, cf. subsistit in in Lumen Gentium
  • "To take one another seriously as brothers and sisters in Christ means constantly calling one another to a deeper conversion to Christ."
  • "It is not sufficient for Protestants to reject [ecclesiology] as though it were not part of that truth to which we are called to be faithful."
  • "If separation for the sake of the gospel is not necessary, it is not justified."
  • "Justification by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone" may well believe that it most adequately reflects the teaching of the Bible, but the formula itself is in fact a sixteenth-century theological construct that is not found in the Bible.
    • Were the Catechism to address directly the justification formula, it would have had to go on to make clear that grace is not alone but confirms human freedom, that living faith is not alone but issues in a life of obedience, that Christ is not alone but always to be found in the company of his Church.
  • Healing the breach between East and West has priority over healing of the breach between Rome and the Reformation.
  • John Wesley: "Then if we cannot as yet think alike in all things, at least we may love alike. Herein we cannot possibly do amiss."
  • pg 215 footnote 34 could be next discussion book: Church Ecumenism and Politics
  • "For the Catholic, faith in Christ and faith in the Church are one act of faith...In loving the Church we love Christ."
  • Protestants implicitly accept the Church's authority: "They accept a definition of Christian orthodoxy that is inexplicable apart from the Church through time. They acknowledge as authoritative a Bible that was, under the inspiration of the Spirit, written in and by and for the Church, and thus do they implicitly acknowledge the authority of the Church."
  • Protestants have tradition: "Evangelicals invoke the authority of persons and theological schools that clearly constitute a tradition of their own. The thought of Calvin or Luther in invoked with a weight of authority not accorded any one theologian in the Catholic Church."
  • "Becoming a Christian and living as a Christian is an intensely personal matter, but it is not a private matter."
  • Magisterium and sola scriptura:
    • "The function of magisterium is no less evident among evangelicals."
    • "Sola scriptura does not appear in the Bible but is itself a formula of a particular Protestant tradition."
    • "Catholics will take second place to none in their respect for the authority of Holy Scripture." (cites DV)
    • "To many Catholics it cannot help but seem that Protestants posit the formal principle of sola scriptura but then surrender effective interpretive authority to a small school of Reformation theologians, with nobody from the previous sixteen centuries being given a voice, except, sometimes, Augustine. In fact, there is a continuing magisterium in evangelicalism, but it is not conscious of itself as being such, and therefore cannot hold itself in disciplined accountability to the entirety of the interpretive community that is the Church through time."
  • "Ritual, like tradition, is inescapable. The difference is in the richness, beauty, and expressiveness of the ritual in question, and in het degree to which it reflects the fullness of the faith and life of the apostolic community through time."
  • "Faith in Christ and faith in the Church is one act of faith. To come to Christ is to come to the Church, indeed to become the Church."
  • "The third millennium will be the millennium of Christian unity."

Topic: Ecumenism

Source

Created: 2024-06-27-Thu
Updated: 2024-11-26-Tue