This created a lasting rift between Packer and other evangelicals, including Lloyd-Jones, to whom the Anglican Church seemed hopelessly compromised. Sproul—who felt that Packer had sacrificed doctrinal integrity. Packer, however, did not flinch. Those who know Packer's work recognize that in no way did he ever diminish or ignore real theological differences between Protestants and Catholics. Packer retained serious reservations about elements of Catholic soteriology.
To the end of his life, he remained troubled by what he considered the Catholic inability to self-correct, as a result of its teaching of infallibility. The dialogue was most amicable, and Packer never showed any agitation. Still, the disagreements were such that at times sparks flew through the classroom. In so doing, he took a stance that some felt contradicted his own ecumenical convictions.
Again, he wrote a statement defending his actions. Nor did he think he was betraying the broad ecclesial stance that he had defended three decades earlier in his disagreement with Martin Lloyd-Jones. Packer was convinced that the Anglican decision to bless same-sex marriages laid bare a basic disagreement between liberal subjectivism, which places the Bible at the judgment of experience, and an objectivist position shared by Catholics, Orthodox, and conservative Protestants , which maintains that the Bible stands in judgment on human experience.
We can surely support that, and not with Roman Catholics only but with anyone who holds those convictions. Billy Graham see image info. The plea for a doctrinal basis, such as that of the B. Those who function in terms of another gospel are brought in and platformed as representatives and servants of New Testament Christianity. They are to be evangelized not evangelizers.
But can there be unity in fellowship where there is no unity in truth? Unity in experience is the most easily counterfeited phenomenon to true Christianity. We long for a working of the Holy Spirit, and will not grieve or quench his coming by endorsing worship and preaching which denies the word which is his breath.
That is the highly questionable conclusion. It would be much better if Dr Packer were to use his friendship with Roman Catholics in writing a loving treatise in which he could point out their deviation from the truth and call them back to apostolic religion. How useful that book might be in the place of another confusing jointly-authored statement with sacramentalists.
The bigger issue raised by the response of Dr Packer to Rome is what should our response be to those who want to remain in friendship with us, preach in our pulpits, speak at our conferences, write for our magazines and publishing houses, and then, also intend to maintain an ecclesiastical fellowship and cooperation with those who, at very crucial areas, are opposing New Testament Christianity?
Who wants the label of uncharitable hyper-separatist? Certainly we should keep talking to these brothers, and read and sell their books on other subjects, but appointing them to teach at our meetings suggests a wider approval which cannot exist, and encourages division, further polarizing a divided Christianity. It is putting a strain on our relationship and it is not necessary. So I ought to have anticipated that some Protestants would say bleak, skewed, fearful, and fear-driven things about this document - for instance, that it betrays the Reformation; that it barters the gospel for a social agenda; that it forfeits the right to share Christ with nominal Roman Catholics; that by saying "we are justified by grace through faith because of Christ" it abandons justification by faith alone; and that its backers should be dropped from evangelical fellowship.
All these untrue things have been said - and it is time, I think, to set the record straight. W hat I write has inevitably a personal angle, for though I was not a drafter of the document, I endorsed it.
Because it affirms positions and expresses attitudes that have been mine for half a lifetime, and that I think myself called to commend to others every way I can. Granted, for the same half lifetime I have publicly advocated the Reformed theology that was first shaped by Calvin in opposition to Roman teaching about salvation and the church and that stands opposed to it still - which, I suppose, is why some people have concluded I have gone theologically soft, and others think I must be ignorant of Roman Catholic beliefs, and others guess that I signed ECT without reading it.
But in fact, while maintaining what Reformed theology has always said about the official tradition of the Church of Rome, I have long thought that informal grassroots collaboration with Roman Catholics in ministry is the most fruitful sort of ecumenism that one can practice nowadays.
And it is that, neither more nor less, that ECT recommends. Perhaps I should say this more bluntly. I could not become a Roman Catholic because of certain basic tenets to which the Roman system, as such, is committed. Rome's claim to be the only institution that can without qualification be called the church of Christ is theologically flawed, for it misconceives the nature of the church as the New Testament explains it.
The claim is historically flawed, too, for the papacy, which is supposed to be of the church's essence, was a relatively late development; if pipeline continuity of priestly orders and a sacramentalist soteriology are of that essence, then Eastern Orthodoxy's claim to be Christ's one church is stronger.
Also, developed Roman teaching on the Mass and on merit cuts across Paul's doctrine of justification in and through Christ by faith. And all forms of the Mary cult, the invoking of saints, the belief in purgatory, and the disbursing of indulgences which still goes on damp down the full assurance to which, according to Scripture, justification should lead through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, the infallibility claimed for all conciliar and some papal pronouncements, and the insistence that the faithful should take their beliefs from the church as such rather than from the Bible as such, make self-correction, as ordinarily understood, impossible. The assumption that the church is never wrong on basics is very cramping. So I find the Roman communion, as it stands, unacceptable, just as more than four-and-a-half centuries of Protestants did before me.
W hy, then, should any Protestant, such as myself, want to maximize mission activity in partnership with Roman Catholics? Traditionally, Protestants and Catholics have kept their distance, treating each other as inferiors; each community has seen the other as out to deny precious elements in its own faith and practice, and so has given the other a wide berth.
There are sound reasons why this historic stance should be adjusted. First: Do we recognize that good evangelical Protestants and good Roman Catholics - good, I mean, in terms of their own church's stated ideal of spiritual life - are Christians together? We ought to recognize this, for it is true. I am a Protestant who thanks God for the wisdom, backbone, maturity of mind and conscience, and above all, love for my Lord Jesus Christ that I often see among Catholics, and who sometimes has the joy of hearing Catholics say they see comparable fruits of grace in Protestants.
But I am not the only one who is thus made aware that evangelicals and Catholics who actively believe are Christians together. The drafters of ECT declare that they accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, affirm the Apostles' Creed, "are justified by grace through faith because of Christ," understand the Christian life from first to last as personal conversion to Jesus Christ and communion with him, know that they must "teach and live in obedience to the divinely inspired Scriptures, which are the infallible Word of God," and on this basis are "brothers and sisters in Christ.
Now, this mutual acknowledgment brings obligations, and one of these is observance of the so-called Lund principle, formulated decades ago in light of Jesus' high-priestly prayer for the unity of all his disciples. This prayer clearly entails the thought that God's family here on earth should seek to look like one family by acting as one family; and the Lund principle is that ecclesiastically divided Christians should not settle for doing separately anything that their consciences allow them to do together.
The implication is that otherwise we thwart and grieve the Lord. Where there is fellowship in faith, fellowship in service should follow, and the cherishing of standoffishness and isolationism becomes sin. So togetherness in mission is appropriate. S econd: do we recognize that the present needs of both church and community in North America not to look further for the moment cry out for an alliance of good evangelical Protestants with good Roman Catholics and good Eastern Orthodox, too?
We ought to recognize this, for it, too, is true. Vital for the church's welfare today and tomorrow in the United States and Canada is the building of the strongest possible transdenominational coalition of Bible-believing, Christ-honoring, Spirit-empowered Christians who will together resist the many forms of disintegrative theology - relativist, monist, pluralist, liberationist, feminist, or whatever - that plague both Protestantism and Catholicism at the present time.
Such a coalition already exists among evangelicals, sustained by parachurch organizations, seminaries, media, mission programs and agencies, and literature of various kinds.
It would be stronger in its stand for truth if it were in closer step with the parallel Catholic coalition that has recently begun to grow. Time was when Western Christendom's deepest division was between relatively homogeneous Protestant churches and a relatively homogeneous Church of Rome.
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