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With this post (Part 9), I conclude a series comparing the teachings of evangelicals and Roman Catholics, exploring both areas of agreement and disagreement. For ease of access, here is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8. Today, I examine one last area in which evangelicals and Roman Catholics disagree, the doctrine of purgatory, and then offer a few concluding remarks.

The doctrine of purgatory and its related issues (the treasury of merit, prayers for the dead and good works for the dead), accepted by Catholics, is rejected by evangelicals. The Council of Trent pronounced excommunication on anyone who rejects this dogma. Catholic teaching staalsotes that purgatory is a place for believers, those who will be ultimately saved, and is a place of purification that must take place before one enters heaven. Catholic sources admit that this doctrine is not taught explicitly in Scripture, but neither is it to be found implicitly. Purgatory is rejected by evangelicals because it is a denial of the sufficiency of the cross. It is also contrary to the immediacy of heaven after death, as taught in Scripture (2 Corinthians 5:8). The concept of a treasury of merit (from saints who have done more good deeds than necessary for their own salvation) is also contrary to the all-sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. Romans 8:1 declares, “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Most importantly, salvation is not merited at all; it is a free gift of God (Ephesians 2:8-9). The whole idea of indulgences is seen as distasteful and repugnant (2 Peter 1:18-19). Regarding prayers for the dead, once again, there is no scriptural support. Likewise, there is no biblical support for praying to the saints. God alone is the proper object of our prayers. Prayer is a form of worship, and only God should be worshiped (Exodus 20:3). The Old Testament condemns attempting to communicate with the dead as necromancy. This practice also practically denies the mediatorship of Christ and is an insult to the intercession of the Holy Spirit.

In conclusion, this series illustrates that despite a number of substantial areas of agreement between Catholics and evangelicals, any hope of ecclesiastical unity is probably rendered impossible by the doctrinal differences between the two groups. This does not need imply that Catholics and evangelicals are enemies. There are many areas of common spiritual heritage and many practical areas of social and moral cooperation. Protestants and evangelicals face the common enemy of secularism and the moral issues which flow from that worldview on such topics as abortion and homosexuality. The significance of our joint doctrinal and moral beliefs and the significant evils of secularism and relativism encourage cooperation, perhaps even demands such. J. Daryl Charles noted:

The real cleavage in Christendom today is… between biblical orthodox and heterodox worldviews. Even the most reactionary of Protestant fundamentalists has more in common with Cardinal John O’Connor and John Paul II than with Joan Campbell and John Spong.

This is Part 8 of my series discussing the relationship between evangelicals and Roman Catholics. I have pointed out many areas of agreement and am now continuing to show areas of disagreement. Today, I quickly discuss doctrinal differences on ecclesiology and Mariology.

Regarding ecclesiology, the Catholic teaching is that the church is not merely an invisible mystical body, but also a visible organization on earth headquartered in Rome. Evangelicals disagree in several areas, including the visibility, unity, priestly authority, and constituency of the Church. The dogma that the Catholic Church is the one true visible church united under the Pope and that the church has priestly power to transform the bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ and the special power to forgive sins is unsupported in Scripture and also lacks any kind of unanimity among the church Fathers. Catholic attempts to use scripture to support these teachings wrench the texts from their contexts and offer no real support. These irrevocable teachings of the Roman Church are unacceptable to evangelicals.

MacKenzie and Geisler claim:

For many Protestants, Mariology and Mariolatry are almost synonymous.

However, evangelicals can and do affirm that she is the most blessed among women, that Christ was conceived in her while she was a virgin, and that by virtue of that conception she is, in a sense, “the Mother of God.” However, the Catholic dogmas of the perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, sinlessness, bodily assumption, mediatorship, and the veneration of Mary and her images are rejected. The belief of Mary’s perpetual virginity is not a huge stumbling-block to evangelicals, but is rejected by most due to clear references in Scripture to his brothers and sisters, as well as the implication of Matthew 1:25 that Mary had sexual relations after the birth of Christ (among other arguments). In 1854, Pope Pius IX infallibly pronounced the dogma that Mary, from the moment of her conception was preserved free from all stain of original sin. Evangelicals reject this teaching on the basis that the three main texts (Gen 3:15, Luke 1:28, and Luke 1:41) used by Catholics to support this dogma fail to support it. The teaching that Mary was free from personal sin during her whole life is not only unsupported in Scripture, but is opposed in Scripture. In fact, in Luke 1:46, Mary affirmed her need for a Savior. Roman Catholic dogmas, over time, reveal a progressive glorification of Mary, to the point where she is virtually deified by many. Catholicism teaches that she was bodily assumed into heaven and venerated as Mediatrix (a mediator of grace) and “Queen of Heaven.” Catholics admit that there is no direct scriptural proof of this doctrine, but affirm its possibility and probability. Evangelicals declare no such probability exists. The Mediatorship of Mary conflicts with the Protestant belief in the uniqueness of Christ’s atonement. Scriptural support is totally lacking.

The most repugnant aspect of Mariology for evangelicals is the veneration of Mary. Nothing in Scripture supports the claim that Mary should be venerated above all creatures but below God or that prayers should be offered to her. Mary was not exalted above all women, but among all women. The Bible clearly forbids the veneration of any creature. We are to worship only God. Mariolatry is idolatry.

In my next post, I will discuss purgatory and provide a few closing comments on this series.

I have been greatly blessed over the past few years to have had the (perhaps, rare) opportunity to reason through and argue important issues with my son, Jeremy. As he mentions periodically in his posts, he and I do not always reach the same conclusions in all matters, but there is certainly much more we agree on than disagree (especially in areas of essentials of Christian doctrine). He is an extremely gifted and intelligent young man (no fatherly bias here!) has certainly been correct on many occasions in which we disagreed and has helped me to correct my views. I hope there has been a reciprocal effect which my arguments have had on his views. Jeremy has been less enthralled with the intelligent design enterprise than I, although he sees many positives in the movement. Recently, he posted a blog in which he pointed out what he perceived as three flaws in Dembski’s explanatory filter:

1. It doesn’t allow us to detect real design that arose due to natural laws
2. It’s account of design detection is partly circular.
3. It doesn’t accurately capture how we actually make at least the majority of our justified design beliefs.

I disagree that the filter is flawed in the way Jeremy describes. He offers the Pluto analogy as an example of flaw #1. That if someday we were to arrive on Pluto and find a series of craters caused by various meteors that, when seen from afar spell out “Welcome to Pluto,” then even if we can trace the paths of each one of the meteors and their causes and find out they are explainable by law all the way back to the big bang, we would still be justified in inferring some sort of design. The first step in the filter asks if a certain finding is of necessity the way it is or is it contingent (could have been otherwise). If I understand Jeremy’s objection, the fact that those meteors could be shown to have necessarily had to land in those places due to prior conditions of the big bang, the filter would cause us to reject design as an explanation. So we would miss design where it in fact seems reasonable to assume design.

In response to this, first of all, I don’t think this is a flaw of the filter, but a strength. The filter is highly specific (very few false positives - it does not infer design if there is none) but has lower sensitivity (higher number of false negatives - it may say something is not designed when it in fact is). These built-in levels of specificity and sensivity insure that we do not make mistakes and ascribe something to design when it could have been produced without design. Additionally, although I think a less significant response to Jeremy’s objection, is that I’m not sure I would be convinced that anyone could show that those meteors actually had to land where they did on Pluto. This particular example would not necessarily be thrown into the rejected pile of non-designed events. Perhaps, I am wrong in this, but it does not seem obvious to me that this is so. Finally, let me quote Dembski (The Design Revolution, p 99) in reference to Jeremy’s proposed false dilemma:

Let me stress again, we are not dealing here with an either-or, pitting material mechanisms against design. Rather it is a question of one-or-both, pitting material mechanisms in isolation against material mechanisms working in tandem with design.

In response to flaw #2, that the problem of specification is circular and undercuts the whole purpose of the explanatory filter, I again disagree. I must admit that the concept of specification as offered by Dembski was a difficult one to wrap my mind around and understand. But I think, properly understood, it is not circular at all. I’ll have to address this in another post as I am out of time. (By the way, I still have two posts left in my series on Evangelicals and Roman Catholics and will finish that series soon.) (Also, by the way, this kind of back and forth between Jeremy and I is what I was referring to earlier that has been invaluable to me in my understanding on important issues. We, up until now, have not “taken it to the web.”)

This is Part 7 of a continuing series discussing areas of agreement and disagreement between evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Most of the information for this series of blogs is taken from the excellent book Roman Catholics and Evangelicals by Norman Geisler and Ralph MacKenzie. Today, I briefly outline the differences in two areas: Justification and the sacraments. (I, once again, remind you that I am unable to give a defense of the Catholic teaching in each area due to the restraints of the blogging medium. This entire series is a greatly compacted review of the arguments presented in the aforementioned book. If you have an interest in this area, I would highly recommend the book.)

Catholics and Protestants differ strongly over the doctrine of justification. Catholics assert the primacy and necessity of grace, but evangelicals hold to the exclusivity of grace (sola gratia) apart from any good works. While Catholics hold to the necessity of faith (at least in adults) for justification, evangelicals hold to the doctrine of sola fide, faith alone is necessary for justification. The Council of Trent proclaimed that …

… by his good works the justified man really acquires a claim to supernatural reward from God.

Evangelicals disagree. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone, “meritorious works” are a nonsensical to evangelicals. They reject any teaching which makes works a condition of eternal life such as that found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church…

… the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful.

Romans 6:23 clearly opposes a salvation derived from grace plus works. One cannot work for a gift. Making works of sanctification a condition of ultimate salvation is misled. Grace and works are as incompatible as the concept of unmerited merit. This teaching confuses working for salvation and working from salvation (the Protestant view). It is similar to the error confronted by Paul in Galatians. Paul argues that justification and sanctification both come by grace through faith alone. Works are not a condition of justification, but a consequence of it. The evangelical teaching is that man is not made righteous in justification (Catholic teaching), but is accounted and accepted as righteous at justification (extrinsic, not intrinsic justification).

Roman Catholicism views the sacraments as causes of grace, not merely “signs” of grace. Catholics teach that sacraments bestow grace objectively, irrespective of whether there is subjective confirmation and without the mediation of fiducial faith. These sacraments (seven in all) are held to be necessary for salvation. Protestants respond to Catholic dogma by asserting that there is a glaring lack of scriptural or historical support for the number of sacraments being seven. The Catholic teaching that a sacrament causes grace ex opere operato (by the work that has been worked) is a mystical, almost magical view of sacraments.

Catholics hold that the sacrament of baptism confers the grace of justification. Evangelicals argue that baptismal regeneration appears to be contrary to grace and is in conflict with the need for faith. In regard to the sacrament of the Eucharist (communion), Catholic dogma teaches transubstantiation, that the wine and bread are literally transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Since, this is held to be the case, it is appropriate to actually worship the consecrated elements as God. Evangelicals argue that to consider the wine and bread to be the actual body and blood of Christ is unscriptural and impossible to defend. It is idolatrous to worship the “host” as this violates the command to worship God under a physical image. The view of the mass as a sacrifice in which Christ is sacrificed afresh is contrary to the scriptural teaching that Christ was sacrificed once and for all, negating the need for further sacrifice (Hebrews 10:12-14).

Next, even more differences between evangelicals and Roman Catholics.

This is Part 6 of a continuing series on the relationship between evangelicals and Roman Catholics. I am now discussing areas of doctrinal conflict between these two groups. In my last post, I discussed the disagreement over the inclusion of the Apocrypha into the canon of Scripture by Roman Catholics. Today, I will briefly consider the evangelical doctrine of sola scriptura and the Roman Catholic doctrine of Papal infallibility.

Regarding the limits of the infallible authority of Scripture, the Reformation stressed two principles: sola Scriptura (the Bible alone) and sola fide (faith alone). Evangelicals affirm these principles and Catholics deny them (when appropriately defined). Sola Scriptura, to evangelicals, means that the Bible is a direct revelation from God, it is the sufficient and final written authority of God, it is clear, and that Scripture interprets Scripture. The Council of Trent emphatically proclaimed that the Bible alone is not sufficient for faith and morals; tradition is also needed. The Church must provide infallible guidance in interpreting the Bible. Importantly, contrary to the claims of the Catholic Church, evangelicals claim no infallible teaching magisterium is necessary to interpret Scripture.

Evangelicals reject the Catholic teaching on the grounds that the Bible itself teaches sola Scriptura. If not explicitly and formally, at least implicitly and informally (e.g., see 2 Timothy 3:16-17). All apostolic “traditions”, allegedly required by the Roman Catholic Church, may be found in the Bible and we need not search outside the Scripture for additional guidance. By way of clarification, Protestants do not hold that we can learn nothing from sources outside Scripture, only that these outside authorities should not be afforded infallible status.

Evangelicals also reject the Catholic claim that the church “determined” the canon of scripture, arguing that the church merely discovered the canon God had determined by inspiring certain books. This question of authority is a crucial difference between Catholics and Protestants.

The Catholic dogma of the infallibility of the Pope, pronounced at Vatican I in 1870 is a major area of disagreement between Catholics and evangelicals. Roman Catholic scholars claim that the Pope is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra, as the official interpreter of faith and morals. Evangelicals argue that the texts used to support this dogma fall far short of their intended use by Catholics (see Matthew 16:18, John 11:49-52 and John 21:15-17). All the apostles and prophets, not just Peter, serve as the foundation of the Church, Christ himself being the cornerstone. Nowhere in scripture is Peter given the unique authority among the apostles claimed by Catholic teaching. There is certainly no reference to any alleged infallibility possessed by Peter. In fact, Peter at one time misled believers and had to be rebuked by Paul (Galatians 2:11). Additionally, whatever apostolic powers Peter possessed, it is clear they were not passed on to others after his death, since to be an apostle one must have been an eyewitness of the resurrected Christ and show certain “signs of an apostle” (2 Corinthians 2:12).

There are other theological problems with papal infallibility, such as the problem of heretical popes. The Catholic claim that we need infallible guidance to understand the infallible revelation is problematic, as well. How is an infallible interpretation any better than the infallible revelation? Evangelicals claim that the essential truths of Scripture can be understood by any literate person. When Catholics counter that a Papal error was not made when the Pope was speaking ex cathedra, evangelicals assert that Papal infallibility dies the “death of a thousand qualifications” and becomes just as fallible as any human teaching when we cannot know when the pope actually speaks ex cathedra.

Next, more important differences in evangelical and Catholic teaching.

In my last post, I tried to give a (very) brief summary of William Dembski’s explanatory filter, which he claims is a slightly more formalized method of the way we commonsensically infer design around us all the time. Dembski also claims that his explanatory filter is already used by many scientists in respectable fields such as forensics, computer science, SETI, and archaeology. The hope, I think, is that if the explanatory filter works, and is already used to detect design in other sciences, then it should also be tolerated as a method for inferring design in other sciences, principally biology and cosmology. Although I think that the explanatory filter is on to something and accurately depicts the way we sometimes come to infer design, I think it has (at least) a couple flaws that make me hesitant to place much faith in it as a big step forward for the Intelligent Design Movement.

The first problem is with the very first step, in that it sets up a false dilemma between design and law. Something that intelligent design advocates have rightly stressed for a long time, especially when answering charges of committing some sort of god-of-the-gaps fallacy, is that design inferences can be justified even in cases where there is no direct divine intervention. That is, even if some event is completely explicable by reference to natural law and initial conditions, it may still be rightly attributed to design. For example (I think this is adapted from Ratzsch’s philosophy of science book), if we someday land on Pluto and find, when we arrive, a series of craters caused by various meteors that, when seen from afar, spell out “Welcome to Pluto,” then even if we can trace the paths of each one of the meteors and their causes and find out they are explainable by law all the way back to the big bang, we would still be justified in inferring some sort of design. This is an extreme example, but I think it proves the point.

Now, it may be said in reply that the explanatory filter is only useful for detecting design where some sort of extra-natural intervention occurred. For now, I will concede the point, although I will have something to say about it in a future post. Nevertheless, even if this were the case, I think that the explanatory filter would already prove less useful than it should be, because, as I stated before, there could be cases where design is justifiably inferred even when an event is explicable by natural law, and we should want to draw that conclusion in these cases. Furthermore, it could turn out that most, or the most important, cases where we can detect design in nature turn out to also be explainable by reference to law.

My other main concern is the problem of specification. How is it that we can tell whether some complex pattern is specified or not? Other than just giving some examples where we can intuitively tell that one pattern is specified and another is not, it’s hard to spell out exactly what specification is. The general idea, as I said in the previous post, is that the pattern is separable from its concrete context. Another way to describe a pattern as specified is to say that we could independently produce the same pattern by using our side information. So in the case of the scrabble letter example, given our knowledge of the English language and how words are formed with letters, we recognize the the event of the scrabble tiles coming to form words as the work of design because we could come up with that same pattern independently of the scrabble tiles being thrown and could specify that independently derived pattern as an example of something that an intelligent source would bring about if it were to arrange scrabble tiles.

Hopefully that description was understandable. If not, I’m sure it is partly, if not mostly, due to my lack of clear exposition. However, I think it is also partly because there is something slightly problematic about the notion of specification that makes it so difficult to expound. Specifically, I think it is circular and undercuts the whole purpose of the explanatory filter. To see this, think of some long combination of zeros and ones. Some obvious combinations that would be good candidates for examples of specified complexity would be all zeros or all ones or a pattern that lists the ascending prime numbers in binary code. However, depending on our side information, we could independently specify any combination of zeros and ones. Or, with some sort of algorithm, we could independently specify every possible combination. Nevertheless, we wouldn’t then think that every combination therefore exhibited specified complexity and therefore was designed. But why not? Well, because although we could specify all these combinations, they wouldn’t be specified in the right way, or with the right side information. But, and here’s the main point, what could it possibly mean to be specified in the right way? Maybe I haven’t thought through this all the way, but the only possible informative answer to this question that I can think of is to say that the pattern has to be the type of pattern that we know or believe would be designed. But if this is the case, then we come to believe something exhibits specified complexity by believing that it exhibits design. But if looking for specified complexity is the way to figure out if something is designed, then the explanatory filter becomes reduced to looking for design by deciding whether one thinks something is designed. This is obviously circular.

One thing that I conclude from this, and that I think could be realized independently, is that we don’t generally recognize design by any sort of formal thought process. Instead, we come to have design beliefs in the same way we come to have perceptual beliefs - not by any sort of reasoning based on prior beliefs, but in the basic way of simply coming-to-believe. Now, this doesn’t mean that inferences had in this way are any less justified, or that I think they have no place at all in science. It just means that they may not fit into science the same way that some people in the intelligent design movement want them to.

To conclude on Dembski’s explanatory filter, I think it is flawed because it doesn’t allow us to detect possibly real design that arose due to natural laws, because it’s account of design-detection is at least partly circular, and because it doesn’t accurately capture how we actually make at least the majority of our justified design beliefs.

Over the next few posts, I just want to give some cursory and unorganized thoughts about some issues involved in the debate about Intelligent Design. By way of disclaimer, my views about these issues are not fully settled in my own mind, and I’ve done only introductory reading on most of the topics. My approach is philosophical, not scientific, and my dad and I have come to some different conclusions on several of these matters.

First I want to look at the question of how we come to believe that things are designed, and whether design beliefs are scientifically legitimate. A helpful way to do this will be to discuss William Dembski’s explanatory filter (which I will do in this post) and then talk about some problems it may have and what they mean for Intelligent Design (which I will do in the next post).

To start with, it’s obvious that we all detect design around us all the time and that, except in some rare circumstances, we are usually justified in doing so. One way to see Dembski’s explanatory filter is as a more formal (and therefore presumably more acceptable for scientific purposes) way to come to these same conclusions. According to Dembski, if we are looking at any particular thing, there will be three possibilities about the origin of that thing; either it came about by law, by chance, or by design. The filter is a method for deciding among these that “faithfully represents our ordinary practice of sorting through things we alternately attribute to law, chance, or design.”

So how does it work? Well, the first step is to see if the event of the thing’s coming-to-be can be shown be necessary or highly probable based on prior circumstances and the laws of nature. If so, then we attribute the event to law and not to design.

The second step is to figure out just how improbable the event was. If the event is only relatively slightly probable, then it is attributed to mere chance and not design. For example, if someone flips a coin four times and gets all heads, then that may just be attributable to chance. However, if the person flips a coin 500 times and gets all heads, then chance is no longer an option.

Finally, we must check whether the complexity inherent to the object or the event of it’s coming-to-be, now that we know it is sufficiently improbable, is specified. Defining what counts as specified gets a little tricky, but it has to do with whether the pattern exhibited can be meaningfully separated from the particular instance it is found in. A straightforward example is that of throwing 11 scrabble pieces on the ground. Suppose the tiles end up on the ground like this: “AJ EH OFSCA LK.” We would obviously attribute that to chance. Now suppose that instead the tiles ended up like this: “THIS IS A WORD.” Although this outcome is equally as unlikely (well, given some perhaps not plausible assumptions about what letters are available, etc.) as the previous one, the pattern that these letters ended up taking is specified in a way that they weren’t the first time. Therefore, we can conclude that this outcome was somehow designed, and is not explicable by chance.

That, in a nutshell, is Dembski’s way of justifiably inferring design by ultimately looking for specified complexity. Read his article at http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_explfilter.htm for a fuller and perhaps more understandable treatment. Next post, I’ll say what I think about the filter.

This is Part 5 of a series examining the relationship of evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Thus far I have given a brief history and covered several areas in which there is general agreement between evangelical teaching and Roman Catholic doctrines. At this point, I will spend several posts discussing important differences in the two groups of believers. These differences are not insignificant.

Evangelicals reject the immaculate conception of Mary, her bodily assumption, her role as co-redemptrix, the veneration of Mary and other saints, prayers to Mary and the saints, the infallibility of the pope, purgatory, the inspiration and canonicity of the Apocrypha, the doctrine of transubstantiation, the worship of the transformed Host, the sacerdotal powers of the Catholic priesthood, and the necessity of works to obtain eternal life. These beliefs are all held by the Roman Catholic Church and stand in the way of any kind of unity between evangelicals and Catholics. I will not be able, due to time restraints, to provide the Catholic defense for each of these, but I will provide the reasons for the evangelical rejection of each.

Today - a quick look at the canon of Scripture. Seven books and four parts of books were pronounced as part of the canon in 1546 at the Council of Trent. These books are otherwise known as the Apocrypha by evangelicals. That same council pronounced excommunication on anyone who rejects them and fails to accept their canonical status. The acceptance of the Apocrypha has significant doctrinal implications since support for prayers for the dead, and hence, purgatory is derived from these books.

There are several reasons why these books should be rejected.
1. These should be rejected since they fail to meet the criteria of “propheticity,” meaning written by a prophet. No apocryphal books even claim to be written by a prophet.
2. These books were never considered to be canonical by the Jewish Bible.
3. No apocryphal book is ever cited in an authoritative sense by another canonical book.
4. Additionally, there is a long line of historical support for the non-canonical status of the Apocrypha.
a. Early Jewish teachers such as Philo and Josephus give no evidence that they should be considered canonical.
b. Jesus and the New Testament writers never quoted the Apocrypha as Scripture.
c. The Jewish scholars at Jamnia (A.D. 90) did not accept the Apocrypha as part of the divinely inspired Jewish canon.
d. No canonical list or general council of the first four centuries of Christian history accepted the Apocrypha as inspired.
e. Many early church fathers spoke out against these books.
f. Jerome, translator of the Latin Vulgate, explicitly rejected them as part of the canon.
g. Certain Reformation period Catholic scholars as well as reformers such as Luther and Calvin rejected them as canonical.

Next post, more important disagreements.

This is the fourth installment of a series of posts concerning the relationship between evangelicals and Roman Catholics. I’ve been discussing areas of agreement between these two groups. Today, I conclude this portion on agreement by examining the doctrines of ecclesiology, ethics, and eschatology. Once again, I stress how brief I must be. Certainly, there is much that could be said to further detail just how much agreement may be found on each topic, as well as, showing areas of disagreement even within these broad areas of agreement.

Despite some major differences on the subject of ecclesiology (The Church), there are also similarities. There are similarities regarding the foundation, nature, and function of the Church. Both parties believe the church is built on the foundation of Jesus Christ. Both see continuity between the Old Testament people of God and the New Testament. Both, also, hold that there is an invisible dimension to the church. Catholics and evangelicals embrace the proclamation of the creeds that the church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

Regarding ethics, there is much common ground. The ethics of both are absolutistic, being anchored in the nature and will of God. Protestants and Catholics embrace the ethical teachings of Augustine and Aquinas. The supreme ethical law is that of love – first of all, love of God for His own sake, and then love of others. Both traditions have held to some natural law theory, embracing universals while rejecting utilitarianism. The moral law is seen to flow from God’s will and is rooted in His nature. It was not just Augustine and Aquinas who held to natural law, protestant thinkers like John Calvin also held to natural law theory, as well. The four cardinal virtues of prudence, courage, temperance, and justice, and the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are valued by both alike. In summary, Catholics and evangelicals hold to a common ethical core of absolute moral principles rooted in the nature and will of God, both embracing natural revelation and special revelation as instructive for ethical living.

Both groups, also, hold to some common beliefs in the area of eschatology, the study of last things. Eschatology is often divided by theologians into individual eschatology and cosmic eschatology. In the domain of individual eschatology, both embrace the judgment which comes after death and both embrace a doctrine which includes heaven and hell. In the realm of cosmic eschatology, evangelicals agree with Catholics in holding to the reality of the second coming of Christ. They also agree that there will come a general resurrection of the dead followed by a general judgment at the end of time. Believers will enjoy eternal bliss while unbelievers suffer eternal condemnation. Both believe that this present world will be destroyed and there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

This post concludes a brief treatment of the areas of agreement, including many Christian fundamentals: The Trinity, the verbal inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the creation and fall of humanity, Christ’s unique atonement for our sins, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the necessity of God’s grace for salvation, the existence of heaven and hell, and the second coming of Christ. However, there is yet much disagreement between Catholics and evangelicals, and that disagreement is not insignificant. To that I turn in my next post.

This is Part 3 of a continuing series examining the relationship of Roman Catholics and evangelicals. My primary source for this series is the excellent book by Ralph MacKenzie and Normal Geisler, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals. In my first post, I laid out a very brief history of that relationship. In Part 2, I took a look at two areas in which these two groups can find much common ground, the teaching on revelation and doctrine concerning God. Today, I continue to look at areas in which Roman Catholics and evangelicals agree, specifically in regard to the doctine of man, Christology, and soteriology.

Catholics and evangelicals hold to a common understanding of the origin, nature, and fall of humanity. Both agree that man was created by God, in God’s image and likeness. Both also agree on the immortality of man and his duty to God, his fellow man, and God’s creation. There is accord on the dualistic nature of man; that he is not just a physical substance, but also is a non-physical substance, or a soul. Both camps believe in the fall of man and in original sin. Not only that, but evangelicals and Catholics agree on the final remedy for the situation, namely, the merit of the one mediator, Jesus Christ. Roman Catholic Church teaching states:

We believe that in Adam all have sinned. From this it follows that on account of the one initial offence committed by him human nature, which is common to all men, is reduced to that condition in which it must suffer the consequences of that fall.

Evangelicals would agree with this summary regarding man. Both groups also agree on the fundamental dignity of human life founded in the Imago Dei.

Regarding the doctrine of Christ, scriptural teaching and the early creeds unify both Catholic and evangelical theology. Both theologies embrace the Christian tradition of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas regarding Christ: Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. Jesus is not part god and part man, but he became truly man while remaining truly God. Christ was not a divine being who only appeared to be human, nor was he a mere human who became divine. Christ was one Person in whom the divine and human natures were hypostatically united. Both Catholics and evangelicals also affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There is also a common core of beliefs regarding the work of Christ in salvation (soteriology). First, both Catholics and evangelicals agree that salvation is historical, that is, it is effected through historical divine revelation and not by mere religious practices or the gaining of wisdom. Salvation is also held to be moral and spiritual by both groups. It involves deliverance from sin, guilt, death, bondage, and the judgment. There is a consensus that there is an eschatological aspect of salvation, a still-to-be-fulfilled future perspective. Importantly, evangelicals and Catholics hold that our initial justification is unmerited.

In my next post, I present more areas of agreement.