Dr. Robert
Koons, professor of
philosophy at the
University of Texas, will be entering the Catholic Church next week following
several years of considering the teachings and history of the Catholic Church. In
a post over at Right
Reason, he writes:
Several
weeks ago, I learned through a mutual friend that Frank Beckwith was intending
to return to the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, Frank learned that I
myself have been moving in the direction of Rome for the last several years. I
am very pleased to be able to announce that I intend to be received into the
Church on May 26th, at St. Louis King of France parish in Austin. My own
story is quite different from Frank’s, although our reasons for entering the
Church of Rome are strikingly parallel.
I was
baptized through the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod, and I have been an
active member of the church body ever since. As a Lutheran, I’ve never thought
of myself as “Protestant”, nor have I ever embraced the kind of extreme
sola-scripturism that has been much in evidence in responses to Frank’s
announcement. I always recognized that the Scriptures are themselves the
foundation of, and very much a part of, a divine Tradition. Although I believed
that only the Scriptures were infallible, I nonetheless assigned great weight
to the ‘rule of faith’ established by the continuous tradition of teaching by
the Church, and as reflected in the writings of the Fathers and the decrees of
Councils. Insofar as I accepted a form of ‘sola scriptura’, it took the form of
insisting that all doctrines must have their source in the Scriptures as
interpreted by the Church, or in the universal practices and teaching of the
early church. This is the only sort of “sola scriptura” principle that can hold
up to logical scrutiny, since the Scriptures themselves provide no definition
of the canon and no clear statement of any sola-scriptura principle (both of
these can be found only in the Fathers and Councils). Extreme sola-scripturism
is, given these facts, self-refuting.
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 “justification”,
embracing a kind of “Pelagian” 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’s 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 “Lutheran” or “Evangelical”, 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).
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’s epistles, which
raised profound doubts about the correctness of Martin Luther’s and Phillip
Melanchthon’s excessively individualistic and existentialist reading of Paul’s
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 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 “evangelical”: 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).
Read the entire post, as well as Dr. Koons 94-page essay on
justification (PDF
document).