The ETS Strikes Back
Really the title of this post is not fitting, but I thought it sounded fun.Recently the President of the ETS stepped down, because he returned to the Catholic Church this past Easter. He had planned on staying until the end of his term (later this year), but word leaked out about his readmittance via the web and began to stir up quite a controversy.
In the words of Francis Beckwith.
The respnse of the Evangelical Theological Society.
I don't know much about Beckwith or the ETS (other than their involvement with Sanders), but I'm interested to hear from those more edjucated on the topic. Also I wonder what people think about Beckwith's claim that, "Because I can in good conscience, as a Catholic, affirm the ETS doctrinal statement, I do not intend to resign as a member of ETS." Do you think Catholics can affirm the ETS statement?
posted by adam @ 2:28 PM
2 Comments:
I wanted to comment by saying that of course a catholic can affirm the statement of faith as would almost any christian. But then I re-read it for the first time in a long time. What I had remembered was the statement about the trinity and the innerrant scripture. Here's that part:
“the Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.”
The ETS points out that catholics can not affirm this:
"Confessional Catholicism, as defined by the Roman Catholic Church’s declarations from the Council of Trent to Vatican II, sets forth a more expansive view of verbal, infallible revelation.
Now they are actually right if they assume that the primary means of inspired, revelatory tradition is textual. If this is the case then they are right. However I think a stronger argument can be made that the infallable aspects of catholic tradition are, as pointed out in the ETS statement above, declarations, meaning spoken and enacted, and then later written down. More so, any catholic could affirm that the bible alone is the written word of God as the declarations and traditions of the church are inspired by the Spirit and have the same authority as scripture without being one and the same.
The only point of debate would be over the "extra books" in the catholic bible. According to the ETS folks this is clearly not the Bible.
Meanwhile, taking a look at that signature list makes me wonder who would want to be a part of this group anyway.
yikes! Jake just stole my thunder with that last line. (it's ok, you can keep it, buddy. Thunder's not really my thing, anyway.) my take? get out, catholic man! you don't want to be in the ETS. I can't think of a single reason why ANYONE would want to be in it.
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