Showing posts with label justification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label justification. Show all posts

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Lutherans and Catholics on Justification

I sometimes read that Catholics and Lutherans have identical views on justification.  But if Catholics and Lutherans have identical views on justification, then it makes you wonder exactly whom the Council of Trent thought it was anathematizing.  If the Lutherans and the Catholics actually have identical views of justification, then one or both of two things is true:

(1) Luther and Chemnitz were as ignorant of their own views as the Bishops at Trent were of theirs.  They all thought their competing views were not only not identical to those of their opponents, but not even remotely compatible.  They thought that those who held the other view were so deeply deluded as actually to fall outside the faith.  But I am not convinced that both sides were such horrid theologians as not to notice that their competing beliefs on this point were actually one and identical. 

(2) Some Lutherans and Catholics today actually do hold identical beliefs on justification and, while they agree with each other, they no longer hold to the views of their respective pasts.  Either both groups have become shockingly superior to previous theologians of their own stripe so that they see now what was resolutely invisible to the best theologians of the past, or else they became liberalized and have defected.


If they became liberalized, when did it happen?  According to some of those who identify themselves as the more traditionalist Lutherans and Catholics, it happened with the the rise of German Protestant liberalism in the 18th and 19th centuries and with Vatican II.

You decide.