The Pharisee, the Tax Collector and the New Perspective on Paul

This morning's sermon to a local congregation on Luke 18:9-14

Introduction

Like a lot of the Bible, our parable from Luke’s gospel this morning is both simple and complicated.

The simple lesson is quite obvious — don’t be like the Pharisee, arrogant and proud and looking down on other people. Instead, be like the tax collector, humble before God because, as v 14 puts it,

... everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

And even this simple lesson is of profound significance. A society where the humility shown by the tax-collector prevails will be very different from a society where the attitude of the Pharisee prevails.

But the passage is also complicated because of its significance for modern theological debate, and this is something of which we also ought to be aware.

Theologians are rather like politicians. You might think you want nothing to do with them. But what they say and what they decide has a major impact on the rest of us. So long as there are politicians in the political field and theologians in the theological field, we have to endure a certain amount of disruption.

The ‘new perspective’

And this particular passage is significant for what it has to say about something theologians call the ‘new perspective on Paul’.

Now we have to say straight away that the term ‘new perspective’, singular, is misleading. There are actually several ‘new perspectives’ on Paul.

But the movement, as such, got under way in the 1970s and it has been gaining ground and adherents, not least in the Church of England, ever since. You may meet very few laity who have heard of it, but you will meet very few clergy who haven’t, and it affects how they treat you.

What these ‘new perspectives’ have in common is a conviction that the Reformation understanding of Paul — especially that which goes back to Martin Luther — was wrong.

Luther, they say, read into the New Testament his own personal concerns with Roman Catholicism, which he thought taught salvation by works.

Luther projected this onto New Testament Judaism, which he also saw as a religion based on salvation by works, and contrasted it with what he read — but misunderstood — in the Apostle Paul.

The problem is, according to the New Perspective, Judaism never was never a religion of works. Moreover Paul understood that.

The only difference between Paul and Judaism was over the importance of Christ and the need for Jewish rituals like circumcision and food laws. Paul’s argument with Judaism was that the boundary of God’s people was no longer marked by whether you were circumcised but whether you believed in Jesus.

Beyond that, however, there was complete agreement — both Paul and Judaism, according to the New Perspective, taught that faith is a response to God’s grace, issuing in a life of faithfulness, on the basis of which we will be judged as worthy or not of God’s kingdom.

Consequences

Now what are the consequences of this ‘new perspective’?

Well, the first, and most obvious, is that the Reformation got it wrong. It was wrong about Judaism. And therefore it was also wrong about Roman Catholicism.

Most importantly, though, it means the heirs of the Reformation are also wrong — and according to people like Bishop Tom Wright, the current Bishop of Durham who has written some outstanding books on Christianity, but is a strong advocate of his own version of the New Perspective evangelical Christians are the most wrong of all, especially in their understanding of salvation.

God and ‘Righteousness’

Now with all that in mind — but ‘on hold’, as it were — let’s have a look at the Bible passage for this morning. In Luke 18:9 we read this:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable ...

What is the problem here?

First and foremost, we’re told, Jesus spoke to people who were , ‘confident ... that they were righteous’. But this little word ‘righteous’ doesn’t quite mean ‘good’ or ‘blameless’, as we might assume.

Rather, it means ‘standing in a right relationship with God’.

The righteous person, then, didn’t necessarily have to be perfect. King David, for example, was an adulterer and a murderer. Yet in Psalm 51 he expresses absolute confidence in God’s righteousness and his own restoration.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking you’re forgiven and put right with God. We think we’re forgiven.

The problem is revealed as we read on: they were ‘confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else’. And what this means is brought out further in the parable.

Two Jews went up to the Temple

Two Jews went up to the temple to pray. What is the difference between them?

They are both Jews, they are both circumcised, they both know the law and respect it. But one is a godfearing and upright man, and the other is a traitor, and probably a cheat, who makes a living acting as an agent for the occupying Roman authorities.

Think ‘tax inspector for Hitler’ and you’re in the right sort of territory.

The Pharisee’s prayer

But there is another difference, and that is in the way they pray. The Pharisee prays like this (v 11-12):

God, I thank you that I am not like other men — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.

And everything he says is true. So what is he doing wrong? First, he is confident he has done nothing that would really be a barrier between him and God. He is not a robber, an evildoer or an adulterer. He cannot think of a reason why God would condemn him.

Secondly, he knows he is not like those who obviously do deserve God’s condemnation — like the tax-collector, for example.

And thirdly, he is diligent in observing the requirements of his religion, he fasts and observes the Sabbath (literally, he fasts ‘twice a Sabbath’), and he tithes. He can think of several reasons why God should accept him.

Undeserved forgiveness

Now look at the tax-collector and his prayer. We are told, v 13, he:

stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

And Jesus said,

I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.

And that word ‘justified’ means ‘counted as righteous’. At the end of the parable, he is what the Pharisee thought he was: in a right relationship with God.

So what has he done right? Has he said, “I will try to do better?” Has he said, “I will go home and live a life of faith in response to God’s grace, on the basis of which I will be adjudged worthy of God’s kingdom?”

No, it’s not that either. What has he done that puts him in a right relationship with God?

The answer is, nothing. Or rather, everything he has done put him in a right relationship with God. He was ‘justified’ when he stood afar off, not lifting his eyes up to heaven, but beating on his breast and saying “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Justification and the new perspective

You see everything the Pharisee said about himself was true: he wasn’t a robber, or an evildoer or an adulterer. He wasn’t like the tax-collector and he was diligent in his religious observances.

But when he came to the Temple, what he should have done was stood afar off, beating on his breast and saying, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

And the fact that he didn’t shows that although Judaism was a religion teaching grace and faith, what actually happened was that people looked to themselves for a positive assurance of their relationship with God, instead of looking to God.

And that is what human beings have always done — that is why we had to have the Reformation, and why it wasn’t a mistake. Because even Christians can forget they have nothing to bring to God, and can start relying on what they are like and what they are doing.

And from there it is a very short step to contempt for others and pride in ourselves.

The outcome

You see, I said at the beginning that if we live according to this parable it will have a profound affect on us and on society.

How will it affect us? For ourselves, it will keep us humble and thankful.

Do we come to Holy Communion, for example, aware of our unworthiness, as the Prayer of Humble Access encourages us to be, or trusting in our own righteousness — glad that we haven’t committed any obvious sins this week, and that we’ve generally done right and been good?

If we understand this parable correctly, we will always come to communion knowing that here God welcomes the tax-collector and the sinner — in fact he really welcomes to Communion the person who thinks they are not worthy to take Communion.

And it will affect society. What will a society be like that is run by people who are more confident about their relationship with God when they can see the fruits of that relationship in their own lives?

It will either produce people who are burdened with anxiety, like Luther was before his own flash of insight, or they will be moralistic, self-righteous and in the end merciless.

By contrast, a society where we all know that we all stand before God as undeserving sinners in need of undeserved forgiveness will be a society where we forgive others their sins as we have been forgiven ours. And I know where I would rather live.

So let us close by praying that God will help us understand this parable, and even more that he will help us apply it to our lives.

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

Is the Pope a Theologian?

Personally, I hold no animosity towards the Pope as an individual. Theologically, however, I have to say that I disagree with him, and I also have to observe that I belong to a Church which, to say the least, distances itself from his theology in its core formularies: the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Ordinal.

I mention this, because the reaction to the Pope’s visit within these shores seems, with the exception of the ranters (amongst whom we must now include Dr Richard Dawkins) to have ignored issues of theology almost entirely.

Thus, where there has been controversy, it has been almost entirely over matters of morality, and as we know, whilst theology and moral issues overlap, they are not at all the same thing.

I could not help, in the last few days, speculating as to how different this visit would have been had it taken place in, say 1860 rather than 2010. Of course, such a thing would have been impossible, but had it, in some parallel universe, nevertheless occurred, the reaction would surely have been quite different, not only from the Anglican church but from the lay leadership of the establishment.

We must remember that the Roman Catholic Relief Act would only have been passed comparatively recently (in 1829), allowing Roman Catholics full participation in the political process.

More importantly, however, parliamentarians and others possessed then a degree of awareness of and sophistication in religious matters which we would today find astounding (though those of us who are clergy might equally be gratified to encounter it amongst our congregations). Parliament was, in those days, quite capable of serious religious debate. Jumping forward half a century, we must recall that it was the House of Commons which twice rejected the 1928 revised Prayer Book on theological — and specifically Protestant theological — grounds.

Today, such a debate is unimaginable. It is not simply that most MPs are of vague or non-existent religious persuasion. More importantly, they lack the knowledge to be able to debate such issues. (We may be sure, incidentally, that when the Synodical Measure to introduce women bishops is finally brought to Parliament, the debate will be entirely about justice — with maybe a few side references to God not being ‘a man’ — and that few, if any, will stand up for theological principles on either side.)

To illustrate what this means, let us again imagine a different scenario — this time not one where a Pope visits an earlier Britain which still valued theology, but one where present-day Britain was visited by a Pope whose Church had an unblemished track-record on moral behaviour. In that case, we may have little doubt that he would have been welcomed with open arms. Indeed, the former Pope, John-Paul II, did receive such a welcome when he visited these shores in 1982, helped no doubt by the absence of scandal, but also by his being a likeable and popular figure whose previous name had not been as unattractive-sounding as ‘Ratzinger’.

In fact, as it turned out, the scandals surrounding the Catholic Church made little difference to the attitude either of the political or religious hierarchy towards Benedict XVI. The former were generally polite and the latter generally rapturous.

And yet one has to question the wisdom of both.

Going back to the hypothetical nineteenth century scenario for a moment, there is little doubt that the political hierarchy of the day would not only have questioned the Pope’s theology, but would have championed our own national Protestantism as one of the reasons for our national success. In other words, they would have said that we were what we were, and enjoyed the freedom and prosperity we enjoyed, precisely because we were not Roman Catholic. Specifically, they would, I have no doubt, have pointed to the personal freedom that flowed from this, particularly in the area of intellect.

Bishop J C Ryle, a firm but moderate Protestant, nevertheless opposed the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church for their social impact as well as their religious significance. Advocating private judgement in matters of religion, he wrote,

I ask you to remember that the greatest discoveries in science and in philosophy, beyond all controversy, have arisen from the use of private judgment. To this we owe the discovery of Galileo, that the earth went round the sun, and not the sun round the earth. To this we owe Columbus’s discovery of the new continent of America. To this we owe Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. To this we owe Jenner’s discovery of vaccination. To this we owe the printing press, the steam engine, the power-loom, the electric telegraph, railways, and gas. For all these discoveries we are indebted to men who dared to think for themselves. (Prove All Things)

And ‘thinking for themselves’ was precisely what he felt that Rome inhibited! The Pope, therefore, would have been just as unwelcome on social as he would have been on religious grounds.

But the religious opposition back then would have been just as strong, which is why it is significant to see the Pope welcomed today by all but the hottest of the Protestant fringe! The reason, of course, is partly that our own Anglican hierarchy has all the vim and vigour of blancmange. We simply lack anyone who can act as a similar rallying point because we lack anyone of comparable stature. As a result, it seems that anything, even from the Vatican, is better to reignite the theological debate than the nothing with which we are otherwise left.

Yet we must not forget that theology matters, even when those with whom we disagree may be members of the Church Universal. Indeed, it is arguable that the recent scandals involving Roman priests were exacerbated by a wrong theology of priesthood, which isolated the perpetrators from public censure and which created an imbalance of power in their relationships with others in the Church.

Again, in welcoming a Christian critique of social policy, we must not forget that Roman Catholic social teaching is the outworking of Roman Catholic theology, and that this, too, is therefore not above theological criticism. Indeed, Andrew Hartropp offers just such a critique in his solidly-researched What is Economic Justice? (Paternoster, 2007, 134-146), beginning in 1891 and looking at some recent pronouncements by the American House of Bishops. He concludes,

One fundamental inadequacy is the lack of a Christological understanding of the Good News. Christ is mentioned as the one who brings the Good News, and who is proclaimed by it, but no further Christological content is given. The consequence, in terms of justice, is that the relationship of Christ himself to oppression, and to the bringing of justice, is simply not addressed. (140)

Undoubtedly there will be those who would want to answer Hartropp’s objections. But we must not overlook the seriousness of the accusation that a purportedly-Christian social theology is not centred on Christ!

And this is precisely the kind of debate that was lacking in the past few days. What should have been said by our Protestant (and therefore Anglican) religious leadership was that the Pope is undoubtedly a very nice man and that the followers of Roman Catholicism are undoubtedly very sincere people, but that he and they are both in error and thus in darkness, and need to come into the light of understanding properly all that Christ is and has done for us.

Had this been 1860 instead of 2010, this message would have undoubtedly have come from many segments of society — albeit, perhaps, without sufficient grace towards the recipients. We have undoubtedly benefited from an improvement in manners in this regard, but we must not let good taste blind us to bad theology.

John P Richardson
22 September 2010

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

Rowan's Roman Bluff

For a man hardly renowned for his robustness, the recent speech given in Rome by the Archbishop of Canterbury was remarkably robust. Of course, it was given partly in response to the announcement from Rome on October 20^th of effectively a ‘safe haven’ for Anglicans disenchanted by the policies of the Church over which Rowan Williams presides. Few will forget his somewhat glum and deflated appearance at the press conference called for that purpose, which must have been an intensely difficult and embarrassing moment for him.

Could it be that the man has feelings just like the rest of us, and that his visit to Rome came as a personal opportunity to put a few things straight? Despite its donnish language, there are elements of the speech which are decidedly ‘in Rome’s face’, and some will welcome this.

Yet in the present climate, it is necessary to look at any such speech not only in terms of how it challenges Rome, but how it accords with the nature and doctrine of the Church of England. And here, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is of as little comfort to the Anglican as it is to the Roman orthodox.

Williams begins with a claim that there has been real ecumenical progress and convergence. Indeed, his theme throughout is that Rome and Canterbury are so close as to be almost touching. What, then, is keeping them apart? He responds that there are three key issues, whose significance must therefore be considered.

... the major question that remains is whether in the light of that depth of agreement the issues that still divide us have the same weight — issues about authority in the Church, about primacy (especially the unique position of the pope), and the relations between the local churches and the universal church in making decisions (about matters like the ordination of women, for instance).

Over against these issues, there is substantial agreement on what Williams feels are the things which really matter. And this is not just a question of theorising. The life of the Church is suffering whilst we delay:

When so very much agreement has been firmly established in first-order matters about the identity and mission of the Church, is it really justifiable to treat other issues as equally vital for its health and integrity?

But to show the difference between ‘first order’ and ‘second order’ issues, we must understand the nature of the Church itself. And this, Williams argues, mut be defined ‘theologically’, not ‘institutionally’, not set up by divine command establishing a ‘chain of command’ but ‘emerging’, as it were, from the nature of God and the incarnation.

Briefly, but importantly, Williams sums up the underlying theology of the Church as being that God is a Trinitarian community, the incarnation opens up the possibility of people being drawn into this community and the Spirit makes this actual. The Church is then constituted by a ‘filial’, godward, relationship and ‘communal’, human, relationships.

So, regarding the sacraments there is a substantial, if not always acknowledged, overlap:

The whole discussion of sacramental life is centred upon how the believer is established in filial communion through the act of the triune God; there is little to suggest that outside the Roman fold there is any ambiguity over this priority of the divine act, or any separation between the act of God in salvation and a purely or predominantly human activity of recalling or expressing that act through human practices. (Emphasis added.)

In the light of this understanding, which Williams clearly believes should be a matter of common agreement, he argues that current ecumenical debate is not really about the essential shape of the Church but “about where the fullest realisation of communion is to be found.” So we return to his three key issues three key issues, on which he poses a series of questions. On authority and the magisterium:

Is there a mechanism in the Church that has the clear right to determine for all where the limits of Christian identity might be found?

On primacy:

Is the integrity of the Church ultimately dependent on a single identifiable ministry of unity to which all local ministries are accountable?

On the universal Church:

Is it an entity from which local churches derive their life, or is it the perfect mutuality of relationship between local churches – or indeed as the mysterious presence of the whole in each specific community?

For Williams these are, it seems, the remaining stumbling blocks in the way of fuller ecumenical recognition. Yet his answers in each of these areas are confusing. On authority, he speaks of how responsibility is distributed amongst “the communion of the baptised”. But on reaching agreement, he says simply that we have different ways of expressing this.

On primacy he says, starkly, there are two options regarding the present papal model: either it is essential, or it is not ‘fit for purpose’. Yet in its place he offers“a recognition of a primatial ministry” that is “not absolutely bound to a view of primacy as a centralized juridical office”, and appeals to the Anglican covenant as an example of communities bound by what he refers to earlier as “terms of lasting loyalty, shared theological method and devotional ethos.”

On the ‘local’ and the ‘universal’, he argues that, “the church is local community gathered around the bishop or his representative for eucharistic worship not as a portion of some greater whole but as itself the whole,” whilst nevertheless recognizing it exists in connection with the other parts. Thus,

... the question here becomes one about what criteria help us establish that the same Catholic life is going on in diverse communities.

To this, he poses a further question:

The facts of corporate reading of Scripture, obedience to the Lord’s commands to baptise and make eucharist, shared understanding of the shape and the disciplines of what we have called filial holiness — can these be utilised as they stand or do we need a further test — visible communion, say, with a universal primate?

The answer lies in decision making processes — say, for example, on the ordination of women. And on this, Williams poses a direct question to Rome:

... the challenge to recent Roman Catholic thinking on this would have to be: in what way does the prohibition against ordaining women so ‘enhance the life of communion’, reinforcing the essential character of filial and communal holiness [the ‘godward’ and ‘human’ elements] as set out in Scripture and tradition and ecumenical agreement, that its breach would compromise the purposes of the Church as so defined [in terms of reading Scripture, baptism and eucharist]?

Williams answers with a further question, but appeals to Anglican experience:

Even if there remains uncertainty in the minds of some about the rightness of ordaining women, is there a way of recognising that somehow the corporate exercise of a Catholic and evangelical ministry remains intact even when there is dispute about the standing of female individuals? In terms of the relation of local to universal, what we are saying here is that a degree of recognizability of ‘the same Catholic thing’ has survived: Anglican provinces ordaining women to some or all of the three orders have not become so obviously diverse in their understanding of filial holiness and sacramental transformation that they cannot act together, serve one another and allow some real collaboration.

So far, the structure of Williams’ argument is clear: we are almost at full, ecumenical, agreement. Fundamentally, we agree on the shape of the Church and the nature of its sacramental life. We are kept apart only on what are apparently second-order issues, and within Anglicanism itself, we have found a way to organize our life which can overcome our own internal tensions. But then, still on this issue of women’s ordination, he becomes completely unrealistic, if not downright disingenuous:

It is this sort of thinking that has allowed Anglicans until recently to maintain a degree of undoubtedly impaired communion among themselves, despite the sharpness of the division over this matter. It is part of the rationale of supplementary episcopal oversight as practised in the English provinces, and it may yet be of help in securing the place of those who will not be able to accept the episcopal ministry of women. There can be no doubt, though, that the situation of damaged communion will become more acute with the inability of bishops within the same college to recognise one another’s ministry in the full sense. Yet, in what is still formally acknowledged to be a time of discernment and reception, is it nonsense to think that holding on to a limited but real common life and mutual acknowledgement of integrity might be worth working for within the Anglican family? And if it can be managed within the Anglican family, is this a possible model for the wider ecumenical scene?

The problem, of course, is with the phrase ‘until recently’. For what Williams presents as a successful balancing act, which might be “a possible model for the wider ecumenical scene” is, of course, likely to come crashing down, and is precisely the reason Rome acted in the way it did via the offer of the Personal Ordinariate.

Moreover, it is surely exactly the experience of the Church of England at this point which demonstrates it is not the way to go. Extraordinarily, Williams says that this is “still formally acknowledged to be a time of discernment and reception”. Yet as we know, the decision making processes of the Church of England mean that process has been pushed forward by facts on the ground —not least the avoidance of consecrating traditionalist bishops —and is now dominated by a ‘kill everybody’ mentality on the part of the pro-women’s ordination lobby.

Like the desperately-unhappy John and Mary O’Leary in Father Ted, he seems to hope that a smiling face will conceal our domestic conflicts from the visiting priest. Yet if there is deceit, it is one which Williams himself seems to believe, for he asks, in apparent seriousness,

At what point do we have to recognise that surviving institutional and even canonical separations or incompatibilities are overtaken by the authoritative direction of genuinely theological consensus, so that they [the divisions] can survive only by appealing to the ghost of ecclesiological positivism?

“Are we missing something?” he seems to be saying, “Or are we just waiting to clear up some trivial difficulties between Rome and Canterbury in the way that the Anglican communion is already doing so successfully?”

All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full – and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us. For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn’t, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

And at this point, the reader may wish to pause for breath, for it is nothing if not a bold take on the ecumenical venture and on the issues which have divided us for the last 450 years.

Yet if we simply survey it from a confessionally Anglican perspective, it is a vision which raises as many questions for Anglicans as it must for ecumenists.

To begin with, is Williams right in his claims regarding what truly divides the Church of England from the Church of Rome? Is it our understanding of the nature and function of the Church, or is it rather, as it was when we divided, still the nature of grace and our response to it, and in connection with that, that nature of sacrament and the ‘sacramental’ priesthood?

A glance through the Anglican formularies would suggest it is still the latter. And the test of this will surely be the liturgical traditions which Anglicans will be allowed to carry over into the Personal Ordinariate. Will this include the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, rubrics and all, or will it only allow the non-sacramental services? And what about the requirement that the standard of belief will be set by the Roman Catechism? One only has to look at the sections on justification and grace to know that Catholic and Protestant are still as deeply divided as ever on this subject, where the Church of England is committed via Article XI to justification by “faith only”.

Again, Williams’ doctrine of the Church, whilst couched in terms of episcopal and sacramental significance that would appeal to many in the Anglican hierarchy, is a long way from Article XIX’s understanding of the Word of God preached as being fundamental to the Church’s nature.

And aside from all this, one must ask why, if the ordination of women and their consecration as bishops are second-order issues which we are so effectively resolving, they generate so much heat and so much potential for real division. Why, if they represent a ‘glass half full’, are so many saying that there must finally be a ‘like it or lump it’ acceptance by those who, as Williams puts it, are still possessed of some ‘uncertainty’ on the subject?

For all its robustness of tone, Williams speech represents what happens when a ‘fuzzy’ theology encounters institutionalized clarity. His appeal, in the end, relies on the acceptance of the same fuzziness. But perhaps because this is its intellectual centre, it seems blind to its own inherent contradictions. Not only is it fundamentally un-Anglican in key areas, it is not even a reflection of the realities on the ground, in the parishes, in the dioceses and in the decision-making bodies of our own national church.

It is a bold try. But Williams does not have the substance behind him to back it up.

John Richardson
21 November 2009

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

Rome's offer — any takers?

The Vatican has now published the details of the ‘Personal Ordinariate’, Anglicanorum Coetibus (does that mean‘Towards a Congregation of Anglicans?’), and at first glance I must say I can’t see how this is really going to work.

The difficult features seem to be these:

I §5 The Catechism of the Catholic Church is the authoritative expression of the Catholic faith professed by members of the Ordinariate.

In other words, members of the Ordinariate will have to accept every detail of the Catechism, just as do ordinary Roman Catholics. But that being the case, why not just become a Roman Catholic?

III. ... the Ordinariate has the faculty to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and the other Sacraments, the Liturgy of the Hours and other liturgical celebrations according to the liturgical books proper to the Anglican tradition, which have been approved by the Holy See ...

But this could hardly include the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (certainly not with its rubrics!). One is left wondering which books will be approved and if there will be enough left to give an Anglican identity to what remains.

The fundamental question which must be asked is why anyone who wanted to be adopted into the Ordinariate would not, on these conditions, simply go the whole way. Answers on a postcard, please ...

John Richardson

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select the 'Anonymous' profile, then type in a couple of letters, select 'preview', then close the preview box and delete these letters.

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

Tom Wright's theology 'leading Protestants to Rome'

A correspondent sent me a link to this article from Christianity Today, headlined 'Not all Evangelicals and Catholics Together'. Bishop Tom Wright is expressing surprise at the thought that his theological views are influencing people in this way. Later in the article he is quoted as saying, "I am sorry to think that there are people out there whose Protestantism has been so barren that they never found out about sacraments, transformation, community, or eschatology." Nevertheless, something big is possibly going on 'across the pond' - and we know how those things seem to travel. JPR

An InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter can look very different in the fall than it did the previous spring. But the chapter at George Washington University (GWU) in the nation's capital is dealing with change of a more uncomfortable kind than absent graduates and incoming freshmen.

Shortly before students left for summer vacation, the D.C. chapter split when all ten student leaders resigned to form a new campus ministry called University Christian Fellowship. More than half of the chapter's roughly 100 students joined them. At issue was student leaders' worry that the national ministry confuses the gospel by cooperating with Roman Catholics, and has a mission statement that Catholics could sign without violating church teaching on the doctrine of justification—how sinners are declared righteous before God.

Over the past decade, justification has become one of the most hotly debated doctrines at conservative Protestant theology conferences and in the catalogs of highbrow Christian publishers. But it has almost entirely stayed in the academy and a handful of churches and denominations. The GWU clash suggests the debate may divide parachurch ministries and reshape evangelicals' relationship with the Roman Catholic Church.

Jolt of Intensity

The long debate over how Protestants should view the Roman Catholic Church has received several jolts of intensity in the past 15 years. The group Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) touted a 1994 statement, "The Gift of Salvation," in which several prominent Roman Catholics affirmed "justification by faith alone." The unofficial statement predated an official agreement between the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation in 1999, called "The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification." The church allowed that anathemas the Council of Trent delivered in the mid-1500s do not apply to Protestants who agree with the joint declaration.

But Protestants' internal disagreement over justification has complicated matters. A Presbyterian Church in America committee reported in 2007 that reformulations of justification (especially two views known as the Federal Vision and the New Perspective on Paul) fall outside the bounds of historic Presbyterian confessions.

The committee's study of the New Perspective focused largely on N.T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham and a prolific biblical scholar. This year Wright published Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision. The book counters his critics, especially John Piper, who published The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright in 2007. (See "The Justification Debate: A Primer," CT, June 2009.)

Another bombshell hit in May 2007, when Francis Beckwith, then president of the Evangelical Theological Society, reverted to Catholicism. The Baylor University philosopher has since published an account of his journey, titled Return to Rome.

"I have no doubt that the New Perspective and Federal Vision have had an effect on the Protestant-Catholic debate," Beckwith told Christianity Today. "I have met several former evangelical Protestants who have told me that Wright's work in particular helped them to better appreciate the Catholic view of grace."

Taylor Marshall went even further. Now a Ph.D. philosophy student at the University of Dallas, he started reading Wright while attending Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He said Wright's work shifted his assumptions so he could understand the Council of Trent's position. Marshall does not believe Wright holds to the full Catholic view. But he said Wright's critique led him to conclude that the Reformers departed from Scripture by teaching "forensic justification through the imputed alien righteousness of Christ." Read more 

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select the 'Anonymous' profile, then type in a couple of letters, select 'preview', then close the preview box and delete these letters.

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.