{"id":1725,"date":"2007-05-19T09:51:39","date_gmt":"2007-05-19T09:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/another-one.html"},"modified":"2007-05-19T09:51:39","modified_gmt":"2007-05-19T09:51:39","slug":"another-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/another-one.html","title":{"rendered":"Another one"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professor Robert Koons, philosophy professor at the University of Texas, a life-long Missouri Syond Lutheran, announces on the Right Reason blog (the same blog where Francis Beckwith has been telling his story) about his imminent reception into the Catholic Church.<\/a><\/p>\n

His story is very interesting and highlights something I have been wondering about for a while. About a year ago or more, inspired by N.T. Wright, I started looking into what is called "New Perspectives on Paul"<\/a> – which is a scholarly historical and theological effort (for lack of a better word) to re-examine what Paul actually said and meant on justification. When I read Wright on Paul it alternately rocked my own world but also confirmed my intuitions – that much of the conversation about this issue over the past 500 years is rooted in an excessively individualistic reading of what Paul said on justification that describes the essential "players" on the stage of salvation that Paul is describing and sorting out as being an individual and God rather than the People of God and God. That’s an extreme simplification, and I apologize for that. <\/p>\n

Well, it turns out that, among other factors, the New Perspectives research prompted some rethinking on Professor Koons’ part:<\/p>\n

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How, then, could I have remained Lutheran? I did so because I believed that the late medieval church (in the form of both the Scotists and the nominalists like Ockham and Biel) had distorted the doctrine of salvation or \u201cjustification\u201d, embracing a kind of \u201cPelagian\u201d error: that is, the notion that human beings can save themselves through the exercise of unaided human reason and will. I still believe this to be so (as do many, if not most, contemporary Roman Catholic theologians). I also believed that the Church erred in its brusque condemnation of Luther\u2019s early protests (again, a view I still hold), and that the Council of Trent solidified a kind of apostasy from the true faith (this is where my current view departs from my former one). I believed that the teachings of the church popularly known as \u201cLutheran\u201d or \u201cEvangelical\u201d, as codified in the sixteenth century Book of Concord, constituted the defining characteristic of the one Catholic Church in its fullness, in continuity on all essentials with the teachings of the Church from the first century until at least the twelfth. The logic of my position was a simple one: the modern Roman Church clearly embraced an erroneous doctrine of justification, which nullified its otherwise strong historical claim to continuity with the apostles (especially on the matter of ecclesiology, the theory of the Church), depriving modern Christians of any good reason to embrace late-medieval and modern developments in Roman Catholic doctrine (including the immaculate conception and papal infallibility).<\/p>\n

Those of you who know more about theology and the history of theology than I did then can easily see how untenable a position I held (although I think this untenable position is one still held by many, if not most, thoughtful Lutherans and Reformed Christians).  My confidence in this position was shaken by three blows: (1) new scholarship (primarily by Protestants) on Paul\u2019s epistles, which raised profound doubts about the correctness of Martin Luther\u2019s and Phillip Melanchthon\u2019s excessively individualistic and existentialist reading of Paul\u2019s teaching on justification by faith, (2) the fruits of Lutheran\/Roman Catholic dialogue on justification, expressed most fully in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification<\/em> in 1997, that greatly clarified for me the subtlety of the doctrinal differences between the two bodies, and (3) a more thorough exposure to the writings of the early Church fathers, especially those considered most \u201cevangelical\u201d: Chrysostom, Ambrose, and (above all) Augustine of Hippo. I began to realize that many Lutheran and Protestant polemicists have been guilty of two fallacies: a straw-man version of contemporary Roman Catholic teaching, and a cherry-picking of quotations from the Fathers, ignoring the undeniable contradiction between the teachings of those Fathers, taken as a whole, and the one-sided version of the faith-alone doctrine on justification embraced by the second generation of the Reformation (especially Martin Chemnitz). The Joint Declaration and the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church aided me in giving a closer and more charitable reading to the anathemas of the Council of Trent (which I still believe to be have been written in an unprofitably provocative way).<\/p>\n

This is a very brief summary of the considerations that led to my theological transformation. I have available a set of private notes that began as a purely intellectual exercise: an attempt to exorcise my doubts about Lutheranism by putting them to paper and exposing them to critique (both on my part and on that of others). As it turned out, the more I wrote, the more reasons I found for changing my outlook. The notes can be downloaded HERE<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bear in mind that I am no professional theologian, and I claim no special authority for my conclusions. I welcome feedback to these notes, but I would ask that my readers take a look first at John Henry Newman\u2019s book, An Essay on the Development of Doctrine<\/em> (1845). Newman\u2019s book is essential background reading for my notes, because he provides the decisive rebuttal to the argument that the supremacy of the Pope and other contemporary, distinctively Roman Catholic doctrines constitute objectionable \u201cinnovations\u201d. Newman convincingly argues that the recognition of genuine development in Christian doctrine is inescapable, as anyone who knows the history of the doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ must recognize.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Via Carl<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Robert Koons, philosophy professor at the University of Texas, a life-long Missouri Syond Lutheran, announces on the Right Reason blog (the same blog where Francis Beckwith has been telling his story) about his imminent reception into the Catholic Church. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}