Carthage burned

So Eric and I were finally successful in conquering a large city with full epic sized stone walls. And yes, we are total computer dorks; and no, we are not ashamed. Our second attempt at a Greek city ended in nothingness since XP loves to tab me out of whatever I'm doing just because I hit the shift key a few times...who the heck came up with that wonderful feature. Of course, when you Tab out, the game doesn't get processor priority and so everything lags out and the game falls of the edge of the earth.

Anyways. I was bored and going around websites and I came across a post on Christianity Today's website. It was Mark Noll (no small time scholar himself) interviewing Jaroslav Pelikan (haha..I won't even comment, not when he's won the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Prize, a nice $1 million). One comment caught my attention:

Could Pelikan have accomplished what he has done if he had stayed in Christian institutions? Most churches or seminaries, Pelikan reflects, remain fundamentally ambiguous about scholarship. Many are eager to use it when it reinforces their settled positions, but they become skittish when it moves into uncharted areas. "You have to give the church what it needs, not what it wants. And in order to do that you may have to leave its payroll. It hurts me to say this because I want to be part of a church where that doesn't have to be said. But show me one where it is not true."

In my few years in the Church, alongside the small view I have into some areas of Christian academics, that seems to be a very true statement. Everything is nice when you back the existent paradigm and ideology, but you start to talk new paradigms and new approaches, you may find yourself standing alone. And all of this in the Protestant church which champions its slogans of 'back to the bible', and 'bible not tradition' - all the while using paradigms painfully unfamiliar to the biblical texts, and doing more distorting than explaining.

There's one thing I'm willing to take the flak over, and that's my stance over Protestant/Catholic relations. Maybe I'm just ecumenically minded, but I can't for the life of me understand why Protestants are so quick off the gun to say Catholics aren't 'saved'/'justified'/'Christians'. Now personally, I just chuckle when I hear that, since I've read Catholic theologians and biblical scholars, and man they know what they're talking about way better than a lot of Protestants. And still I hear the fight over we Protestants believing in 'justification by faith', and Catholics believing in 'justification by works'. That is rubbish. If I understand correctly (haha!), we're saying the same thing.
The sixth session of the Catholic Church's Council of Trent, in 1547, defined justification as the regeneration and renewal of the person: "not only a remission of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inner person through the voluntary reception of the grace and gifts by which an unrighteous person because a righteous person". Now Luther, he was talking about justification as the declaration of righteousness, and NOT with the process of sanctification (for which Protestant theology maintains the separate word 'sanctification'). Thus, Catholic 'justification' = Protestant 'justification + sanctification'. I think you can see the problem here. One says justification by faith, and means that the initial declaration of righteousness is by faith; the other says justification by works and means that the whole life of regeneration and renewal is by works. And both are right! In fact, the Council of Trent also declared "we are said to be justified by faith, because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification, without which it is impossible to please God." I don't know any Protestant who wouldn't agree with that one.
Interesting how misunderstanding has cause so much division and turmoil in the church. I still laugh in sorrow at the irony. Pick up Galatians where Paul talks so much about justification by faith. The whole PROBLEM in Galatia was that the church was being divided: Jewish and Gentile Christians were no longer fellowshiping together. Paul comes along and says we are justified by our faith, not by works of Torah (that's another post...another incredibly misunderstood part of the 1st century world). So all those ethnic and cultural boundary markers (circumcision, food laws, Sabbath) do not mark out God's people, but faith does. Therefore, both Jew and Greek, being justified by faith, can sit and eat at the same table together as one church. Paul's move to unite a breaking church has been used to divide it. Poor guy must be rolling around in his grave as we speak.

For more info, check out:
McGrath, Alister E. Christian Theology: An Introduction (2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 443-447.
Council of Trent. (Sixth Session) See especially chs. 4, 8, and 10.
Another (easier to read) online text of Session Six.

I'll stop before I write a draft term paper.
Have mercy on my fiery tongue.
Peace.