John Bugay, one of the authors at Triablogue, posted an interesting piece about Roman Catholicism recently, which I link below.
BTW, the lead writer at Triablogue, Steve Hays, went to be with the Lord some months ago. John and some of the other writers have tried to pick up the slack since then. Bugay is a PCA man who grew up Catholic, got saved in the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, reverted back to Catholicism for some time in the 80s and 90s, and then embraced the Reformed faith. This is not a theoretical issue for John. It’s been a long term project for him to wrestle through these issues. I suspect he will have more to say as time goes on.
I’m inclined to agree with what he says here. I realize this may seem contradictory to the praise I offered for Joe Sobran in another thread a few days ago. If you want to accuse me of inconsistency, you’re probably right, and yet foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds…
Interesting … one reflection I had on the piece is that Catholicism itself is now quite a fractious and fractionated institution, with as many divisions as Protestantism and often over the same issues. It depends a lot on which sort of Catholic is turning up at the party; as with ourselves, “The centre cannot hold”, and hasn’t done so for some time.
Back in the day I had something to do with a local Catholic Charismatic group, and while I would not do that again, the people I engaged with certainly took their Bibles seriously, for one thing.
In one respect, this post is simple consistency with the WCF XXV.vi, and I would appreciate more Presbyterians talking like this. If it is not true that Roman Catholicism is “a channel of satan into our culture”, if it is not true that the Pope of Rome is “that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God”. Then whatever was wrong in the 1500s-1600s was not enough to justify the upheaval of the Reformation.
As a blog post, it would be much more useful for the author to elucidate the mechanism whereby Roman Catholicism has been the source of damage in our culture. There are a number of Catholics who readily point to Reformed seminaries in states that were founded by Puritans, which seminaries are now producing the witches who preside over the corpses of the mainline denominations. How did the Romans destroy our seminaries?