Happy Reformation Day!

“We confess together that all persons depend completely on the saving grace of God for their salvation. The freedom they possess in relation to persons and the things of this world is no freedom in relation to salvation, for as sinners they stand under God’s judgment and are incapable of turning by themselves to God to seek deliverance, of meriting their justification before God, or of attaining salvation by their own abilities. Justification takes place solely by God’s grace.“

(from the Joint Lutheran/Catholic Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification [Emphasis mine])

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

David Kirkpatrick has just written the sanest thing I’ve read about the influence of Evangelicals on American politics in a long time. And it was published in . . . wait for it . . . The New York Times.

My favorite quote comes from:

“Frank Page of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C. [who had been elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention], campaigned on a promise to loosen up the conservatives’ tight control. He told convention delegates that Southern Baptists had become known too much for what they were against (abortion, evolution, homosexuality) instead of what they stand for (the Gospel). “I believe in the word of God,” he said after his election, “I am just not mad about it.”

Amen, Pastor Page.

Gregory the Great: Commentary and Confession

This text comes from the very end of Gregory’s commentary on Job. It is perhaps the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read in a biblical commentary. The translation is by James O’Donnell.

Johan Huizinga Online

I was surprised today to find that Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen the famous history of the end of the middle ages by Johan Huizinga (OY zing! ah) is available online both in its original Dutch and in English translation.

Send up of Radical Orthodoxy

Read it at the Smithy.

Paul Franks on the dangerous of anachronism

One cannot undertake to revitalize the past without running the risk of anachronism. And the danger of anachronistic history of philosophy is not solely the danger of inaccurate history, for philosophy’s interest in its history is not solely historical. In the attempt to understand an alien past by overcoming the present, we can discover not only new answers to familiar questions, but also new possibilities for philosophical questioning. Anachronism precludes such discoveries.

Paul Franks, “The Origins of Post-Kantianism” in Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 111-112.

That Protestantism is not inherently vicious.

My former post Is Submission to the Pope’s Authority a Virtue? seem to have sparked an unsuspected amount of commentary. The most important bits of it were from Scott Carson [part I and part II, to which I responded here] and Mike Liccione [here]. Thanks to the comments and responses of various thinkers around the blogosphere I now see I have expressed my thoughts on the doctrine of Scripture inexactly, so I’d like to take another try at a more precise formulation. Too many different issues and objections have been raised to possibly hope to treat of them all. Instead, I am going to try to do just three things: (I) articulate what I will call The Catholic Moral Objection To Protestantism (hereafter, just The Catholic Objection), (II) elaborate my own view, which I think rebuts the Catholic Moral Objection, and (III) rebut some criticisms.