Don't get it twisted - my love for early ecumenical creeds isn't a group hug with Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and company. While many ex-hyper-preterists are all about the Kumbaya and dancing around the fire, I'm not RSVPing to that party. - Jason

All of these “and’s” are outworkings of Rome’s theologico/philosophical commitment to its Tradition, specifically to Thomas Aquinas’s vision of the “analogy of being” (analogia entis) between nature and grace, and between creation and God, the former of which Rome regards, over against Reformation theology, as being still fundamentally good in spite of the Genesis fall. For myself, standing with the Reformers who contended that the first principle of all true theology is the fact that “God is there and he has spoken with finality in Holy Scripture,” while I often disagree with the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, I do agree with him completely when he wrote: “I regard the analogia entis as the invention of Antichrist, and think that because of it one can not become Catholic.”1 For it is indeed the invention of Antichrist when one adds anything to the great sola’s of the Bible and the Reformation. The “and” in “grace and …,” “Christ and …,” or “faith and …” evokes the apostolic curse and leads to the soul’s damnation (Gal 1:6–9; 5:2–6; Rom 11:6)!

I do not deny, of course, that Protestantism has its faults2 and perhaps in some quarters even some idolatry. But from formal systematic idolatry, I would contend, Protestantism as a doctrinal system is virtually free. This cannot be said for Roman Catholicism: “Romanism in perfection is a gigantic system of Church-worship, Sacrament-worship, Mary-worship, saint-worship, image-worship, relic-worship, and priest-worship,—… it is, in one word, a huge organized idolatry.”3

Accordingly, although there is little reason to believe that Pope John Paul II would heed my (or any other Protestant’s) urgings since he reaffirmed his confidence in Trent’s deliverances on justification as recently as 1995, if I had a fifteen-minute private audience with him I would respectfully attempt to take him to Galatians 1:8–9 and urge him, first, to recognize that according to Paul the content of God’s law-free gospel was already fixed by A. D. 49—indeed, it was already taught in the Old Testament (Gen 15:6; Ps. 32:1–2; see Rom 4:1–8)—and, second, for the sake of his own soul and the souls of the people of his communion, to repudiate the long stream of later additions which Romanism has added through the centuries to God’s gospel of justification by faith alone, especially the Council of Trent’s unevangelical, nomist, anti-Pauline teaching on justification, taking the church thereby away from the “sincere and pure devotion” (ἁπλότητος, haplotētos) which is in the Christ (2 Cor 11:3). And I would stress, because of these idolatrous additions, that he and all other Catholics are in peril of losing their souls.

I know that some readers will bristle at and be put off by my last remarks as being not only highly judgmental and irrational but also unbridled stridency and serious error since, they would remind me, the pope and the Roman Catholic faithful regularly confess their faith using the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon, and the Athanasian Creed. This observation is true enough, and I commend Rome for revering these early Creeds as valiant efforts to state and to protect the full unabridged deity of Jesus Christ and thus the triune character of the one living and true God. But what is overlooked is that these early creeds are not evangelical creeds, that is, creeds explicating soteric matters. As I just intimated, they were framed in the context of the Trinitarian and Christological debates in the fourth and fifth centuries and are sorely underdeveloped respecting and virtually silent on soteriological matters. As has been often pointed out, there is nothing in them that the Judaizers whom Paul confronted in his letter to the Galatians could not also have endorsed. Nevertheless, Paul condemned the Judaizers in the strongest terms possible because they were preaching “another gospel which is not another” when they corrupted his doctrine of justification by faith alone. Quite obviously, according to Paul there is no saving value in holding to an “orthodox view” of the person of Christ if one is at the same time also holding to an “unorthodox” view of the work of Christ. Which is just to say that the question of who Jesus is cannot be separated existentially from the question of what he has done for us. And if Philip Melanchthon is right when he said, “This is to know Christ: to know his benefits,” then one must even conclude that Rome does not even know correctly who Christ really is!

In order that I might make myself crystal clear here—and what I am now about to say may shock the reader but I assure him that I do not say it for its shock value—I would contend that one can believe from his heart that every statement of the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon, and the Athanasian Creed is true and still be lost, if in order to be saved he is trusting to any degree in his own character, and/or if he believes that he must contribute at least some good works toward his salvation, and/or if he is trusting in Christ plus anyone or anything else. Church history is filled with too many examples of such “believers” for us to ignore this fact, and they who so believe do so at the peril of their own souls. Martin Luther as an Augustinian monk confessed his faith many times during his monkish days using the Apostles’ Creed, but according to Scripture until he cast himself in simple faith on Christ’s saving work alone for his justification before God he was lost. John Calvin in his early years had the same experience. Until these men cast themselves in simple trust upon Christ alone they were unsaved. So one must clearly see that there is a danger in reciting even the revered, time-honored, truth-laden Apostles’ Creed if one assumes that by simply believing its tenets one is thereby necessarily saved. For it is possible to believe the Apostles’ Creed, and all the other Christological creeds as well, but also believe at the same time that if one would go to heaven when one dies one must still put some kind of an “and” or a “plus” of his own good works after Christ’s perfect work of obedience. But they who would trust in the work of Christ plus their own “good works” that possess, as they are informed by Rome if they are Roman Catholics, “congruent merit” before God, and/or in the “pristine righteousness” and intercessory work of Mary and Rome’s designated saints, and/or in their pilgrimages to Rome’s designated holy sites, and/or in their earning of indulgences, according to Paul, as the Judaizers did before them, have made Christ’s cross-work of no value to them (ὑμᾶς οὐδὲν ὠφελήσει, humas ouden ōphelēsei, Gal 5:2); they have been alienated from Christ (κατηργήθητε ἀπὸ Χριστοῦ, katērgēthēte apo Christou, 5:4a); they have fallen away from grace (τῆς χάριτος ἐξεπέσατε tēs charitos exepesate, 5:4b); they have abolished the offense of the cross (κατήργηται τὸ σκάνδαλον τοῦ σταυροῦ, katērgētai to skandalon tou staurou, 5:11); they are trusting in a “different gospel which is no gospel at all” (1:6–7), and they are doing so at the peril of their souls, because they show thereby that they have never been truly regenerated by the Holy Spirit (or they would submit to the teaching of Holy Scripture alone in the matter of salvation4) but are still lost in their sin.5

I am quite aware that if today a minister leads a quiet life, leaves the unconverted world and his misinformed Catholic friends alone, and preaches so as to offend no one, many will call him a “fine churchman.” I am equally aware that when one expresses such opinions as these I have expressed in this monograph there will be many who will say: “He is no churchman; rather, he is a schismatic.” I remain unmoved by such an accusation and believe that the Day of Judgment will show who were the true churchmen and who were not. For myself, I am convinced that they are the truest friends of Jesus Christ and his church who labor most for the preservation of the truth of the apostolic gospel even though they may be regarded in their own time as “firebrands” and “troublers in Israel.” So, because Pelagianism, including in particular the modified form it takes today in Roman Catholicism, is always an attack on the sola gratia, solus Christus, and sola fide soteric principles, claiming as it does that man deserves at least some measure of credit for effecting his salvation, if not in its initiation, at least in his cooperation with initiating grace, and because Rome has given confessional Protestants no reason to anticipate any theological concessions on its part since its post-Vatican II teaching is a “seamless robe” which can brook no concessions without mortally damaging the whole, I would contend that the true church of Jesus Christ must ever be on guard to insure that the sola gratia, solus Christus, and sola fide soteric principles of Holy Scripture and of Paul specifically continue to be proclaimed as the sole ultimate way of salvation.

Furthermore, all the more is this vigilant proclamation necessary today since one has only to visit the great cathedrals of Europe, hear the Masses being said, and witness for himself the rows and rows of purchased burning candles “praying” for the souls in purgatory, or visit Fatima in Portugal, as I have, or Lourdes in southern France and observe the Roman Catholic superstitions evidenced there every day, and then try to find a Protestant church in those cities in order to hear the pure preaching of God’s Word to realize that a doctrinal reformation is as sorely needed today within Christendom as it was in the sixteenth century in order to capture once again the glorious truth of the Pauline gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ’s preceptive and penal obedience.

Such a reformation can and will come only through public doctrinal conflict with Rome, openly pitting both in books, monographs, and pamphlets, and in sermons from the pulpit, first, the carefully exegeted, hermeneutically sound salvific teaching and world-and-life view of Holy Scripture against the superstitions and idolatries of Roman Catholic Tradition, and second, a sound knowledge of Rome’s historical origins against its pretensions. Protestants should not be afraid of such conflict, for the theological genius of the Reformation is really a summons to return to the simplicity of the apostolic gospel: from looking away from the institutional church to Christ, from looking away from Mary and Rome’s many other intercessors to Christ the sole Advocate, from looking away from the “unbloody” Mass to the immeasurable worth of Christ’s “once for all” bloody self-sacrifice, from looking away from the meritoriousness of our alleged good works to God’s justification of the ungodly on the sole basis of Christ’s doing and dying. In a day when the Roman Catholic Church is receiving “great press” in the Western media and growing throughout the world, it is high time for evangelical Protestant preachers and theologians civilly and warmly but also publicly and firmly to distinguish again for their people and the masses the Protestant faith from that of Roman Catholicism. For upon the doctrinal distinctives of the “sola’s” of classic Protestantism hang the destinies of immortal souls.

Reymond, Robert L. 2001. The Reformation’s Conflict with Rome: Why It Must Continue. Fearn, Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications.

1

Karl Barth, “Foreword,” Church Dogmatics, translated by G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936), I/1, x.

2

Roman apologists have incorrectly viewed modern theological liberalism and Barthianism as the natural fruits of the Protestant Reformation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rome’s own insistence on human free will and human freedom has contributed decisively to theological liberalism while Barthianism is a perversion of Reformation thought, indeed, a “new modernism.”

3

J. C. Ryle, Warnings to the Churches, 158, emphasis in the original.

4

In light of John 4:41–42, 8:47, 1 Thessalonians 2:13, and 1 John 4:9–10, Westminster Confession of Faith, XIV/ii, reminds us that the Christian who has saving faith “believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein.”

5

This is why the practice of some so-called “Protestant” evangelists who send their Roman Catholic converts back to the Roman Catholic Church is such a deplorable and scandalous compromise of the truth of the gospel. So-called “cooperative evangelism” that seeks Roman Catholic support for “evangelical” crusades does great harm in that it leaves every community in which it occurs in confusion as to what the true gospel is and where one should go to hear its proclamation. Such “cooperative evangelism” should be vigorously opposed by those who love the gospel that the apostles preached.

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The Conflict Between the Reformation and Rome…