withallyourmind.net

Michael Horton was asked what advice he might give to an evangelical who is considering becoming Catholic or Orthodox. I think his answer, found in this article, is right on:

Here’s how I would counsel such a person: Start with the gospel. The gospel creates and sustains the church, not the other way around. If the Evangelicalism familiar to you has been a constant stream of imperatives and moral exhortation, whether in rigid and legalistic or warm and friendly versions, the antidote is not to follow different rules for attaining justification, but a constant, life-long, unremitting immersion in the good news that Jesus Christ’s obedient life, death, and resurrection are sufficient even to save miserable Christians.

That is what the Reformation was all about, and it is why we need another one, even in Protestantism as much as in any other tradition. If our salvation depends on anything done by us or even within us by the Spirit, then our situation is hopeless.

Despite their own differences, Rome and Orthodoxy are at one in telling us in their official doctrinal statements that this message is wrong, not just in emphasis, but in the doctrine itself. According to Roman Catholic teaching, it is a serious error, heresy, in fact, to believe that we are accepted by God in Jesus Christ apart from any virtuous activity on our part and while we remain in ourselves actually sinful. Our meritorious activity must play some part in our final justification, according to both Rome and Orthodoxy.

One might hear more of God’s grace in the Mass or in John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith than in a month of Sundays in many Protestant churches today, even some of our own churches that are confessionally bound to teach otherwise. But in Rome’s official teaching, not to mention in its popular piety, the doctrine that we are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, apart from any inherent righteousness, remains anathema.

HT: Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds