Rome has repented nothing since 1517 and has only changed tactics in attempting to bring us under her tyranny. As with the Anglicans in 1977, so with many evangelicals today. These men have forgotten that false teachers come in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15); that bad company ruins good morals (1 Cor. 15:33); that Rome and the East have buried the gospel in human tradition (Matt. 15:1-6) and idolatry; that God curses those that alter the gospel (Gal. 1:6-9); and so many other things that we might say unto them: “about this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing” (Heb. 5:12).
I have before me a recently recovered sermon by Martyn Lloyd Jones from 1977, titled “The Sword and the Song.” Speaking before the British Evangelical Council, he addressed then recent developments among evangelicals in Britain. Regrettably, they sound remarkably like trends among some professing evangelicals today, albeit ones that are by no means limited to Britain. I recommend you listen to the entire sermon at the MLJ Trust and ponder its similarity to present circumstances.
He says, for example, that at the Evangelical Anglican Congress in April, 1977, there was a man who declared that the Reformation was the greatest tragedy in the history of the church (32:40). Similar things have been said recently. In 2018 Regent College, which describes itself as “both evangelical and orthodox,” saw its then J.I. Packer Professor of Theology, Hans Boersma,[1] state, “I think the Reformation is not something to celebrate but is primarily something that we should lament—that it is primarily a tragedy.”
Elsewhere Lloyd Jones quotes the then bishop of Leicester saying that “throughout the first 40 or 50 years of my life, one was accustomed to a fairly sharp divide between the evangelical and the catholic movements in our church,” but that “during these recent years these lines of demarcation have become blurred” (34:20). That also sounds familiar. In the Center for Classical Theology’s magazine Credo, one can read things like the following.
In a book review of Piercing the Clouds: Lectio Divina and Preparation for Ministry (which book is part of a Romanist press’s “Catholic Theological Formation Series”), the reviewer says:
The contributors argue not only that historical-grammatical and devotional readings of Scripture can happen together but that they should happen. Especially in the spiritual formation of budding Catholic priests. Drawing on the writings of the early church, medieval monks, and Pope Benedict XVI, they offer six essays building their case. . . there is plenty within these pages to be relevant for seminarians across ecclesial boundaries. (emphasis mine)
The reviewer, a member of a non-denominational church in Tennessee, sees no problem with Protestants using a book that is explicitly meant for training Roman priests to train their own seminarians. He later links the two explicitly, saying “what the church needs today are Catholic priests—and Protestant clergy—who are molded by exegetically-informed lectio.”[2] Err, no, we don’t need any Roman priests, so-called, and every man who serves in that capacity should promptly repent and begin to serve God in truth, laying aside the falsehoods of that communion to unite with God’s people as they are gathered in the churches of the Reformation.
But to my point here, that which was the case in the 1970s Anglican church is also the case more generally now. Credo is primarily run by Baptists associated with Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Yet they have no qualms commending books that draw on writings by monks or the pope, nor in giving a platform to people like Boersma – whom they awarded with their “best theological retrieval” book award for 2023 – or members of Roman orders like the Dominicans (as here), nor, for that matter, women who are ordained in Protestant denominations renowned rather for their apostasy and decline than for any virtue, such as Jennifer McNutt of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. McNutt is also a professor at Wheaton College’s School of Biblical and Theological Studies, whose self-profession of evangelical faith needs no elaboration, but which is similarly suspect, not least since they employ two women professors who are also ordained in the Anglican Church in North America, one of whom seems to harbor some Romish sentiments about Mary (see my article here for an elaboration). Again, as in Lloyd Jones’s day, the “lines of demarcation seem to have become blurred.”
Or again, Lloyd Jones says that there was a difference in notions of scripture’s nature and authority in 1977 in comparison to the past, that people were arguing:
It’s not enough to have a translation in English, they say, of the Hebrew and the Greek. Oh no, you must have much more. You must know the cultural milieu, the cultural setting in which the scriptures were written. And they actually go so far as to say this, that you cannot understand the scriptures unless you know something about this cultural setting. Indeed, one of the leaders of this school on the continent of Europe has actually said this, that it is virtually impossible for any men to understand even the New Testament today, because we can never put ourselves into the cultural position and the thought forms of the people of the first century. (40:18)
That sounds like the need to ‘contextualize’ everything some people among us espouse, and reminds me of N.T. Wright’s argument that our previous perspective on Paul (esp. viz. justification) is wrong because we fail to understand the framework of his thought. Lloyd Jones helpfully contrasts this with “what the reformers called the perspicuity of the scriptures” (41:52), and notes that its logical outcome is a complete reliance on the perspective of scholars. In that vein he elsewhere notes the shift in notions about authority:
There has been this great change in the attitude of evangelicals. Towards what? Well, towards tradition. Not only scripture, but tradition. The old position of the Roman Catholic Church that you don’t merely assert the supremacy of the scriptures only, not sola scriptura, [but] tradition also as defined by them. (25:29)
These days it seems that every time one turns about he is being assailed with talk of “The Great Tradition.” There is a contemporary movement of what is called theological retrieval or ressourcement, and outlets like Credo and its associated contributors are at the center of it in the evangelical world. This movement says that this “Great Tradition” (which they always capitalize) that we ought to retrieve includes the ancient creeds and confessions, the catholic doctrine which the church has always believed, and that it provides the necessary framework to properly understand said creeds and confessions, and to be faithful adherents to the faith.
I have written about this elsewhere, including how the thing has its origin with Rome and her contemporary ecumenism, of how it includes Platonism, and of how it leads people to make some bizarre claims (regarding the aforementioned, Rome-sympathizing Boersma as Reformed; arguing that the Eastern communions’ notion of ‘deification’ is native to Reformed theology). It has also led to the present obsession with Aquinas, an idolater, whose fanatical partisans have portrayed him and the scholastics more generally in glowing terms as essential to reviving contemporary theology. Boersma actually has a chapter called “No Plato, No Scripture” in his book Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew, and Credo used the same formula to say “no Plato, no Augustine” in the introduction to its issue on Platonism:
Perceiving the philosophical truth within Platonism, the Great Tradition believed Platonism’s metaphysical commitments could serve Christianity. Consider Augustine, for example, whose conversion to Christianity may have been an impossibility apart from Platonism.
Their broad argument is that the “Great Tradition” is necessary to understand both scripture and the confessions and to escape the stifling intellectual climate of ‘modernity’ that skews our understanding of everything. Enter Craig Carter, whose Substack is called “The Great Tradition” and who is producing a trilogy of “Great Tradition” books, the second of which won the best “Theological Studies” book award from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Journal in 2021. At Creedo he has an article, “The Metaphysics Behind the Reformed Confessions,” that argues this way, speaking of “recovering the riches of seventeenth-century continental and English pastors and theologians who utilized the metaphysics of the Great Tradition to do theology and write and expound the great confessions of Protestantism.”
Compare Lloyd Jones again: “tradition, as defined by them.” Yet this is what leading contemporary Protestant theologians are enamored of just now. Just the other day Credo posted a video titled “Why we love the Bible (and read it with the Great Tradition).” They say that to read scripture for oneself apart from this tradition is to be a ‘biblicist,’ their favorite bogeyman. They say that to be a biblicist is to become a sectarian separated from the church, to risk becoming anti-intellectual and falling into all manner of heresy like anti-Trinitarian and Socinian errors. And so the guardrail to prevent that, on their view, is this “Great Tradition.”
Now I do not consider myself a biblicist, nor propose to enter fully into that debate, but I do say that this bears a frightful similarity to what Lloyd Jones observed in his own day. Leading Protestant theologians are taking their intellectual cues from Rome and falling all over themselves to hobnob with her scholars. Look at what he said of some of the evangelical Anglicans in 1977 on this point:
They’re actually proclaiming and boasting of the fact that their attitude to the Roman church and the Greek Orthodox church and the Russian Orthodox church has undergone an entire change. (32:20)
And:
We are not prepared to recognize all who call themselves Christians as being Christians. This is what these people are doing. They assume that if a man says, I am a Christian and he belongs to a church, it doesn’t matter what he believes, doesn’t matter what he denies. (45:05)
And again, reading what was said by one of its leaders at the birth of the United Reformed Church:[3]
This is a congregationalist speaking, a successor of the men ejected in 1662.[4] “No one,” he says, “who was present at the inauguration of the United Reformed Church in Westminster Abbey is likely to forget the moment when the archbishop of Canterbury, the [Roman] cardinal archbishop of Westminster, and the moderator of the Free Church Federal Council pledged themselves to pursue together that fuller unity of which the URC was a small foretaste.” (17:20)
Union among Protestants was just the first step in a larger movement for union among all professing believers, hence why the leaders of the Anglicans and English Romanists were present.
A similar ecumenical strain marks certain corners of the contemporary Protestant theological academy. They frequently commend members of Rome and the East and give them platforms and awards. Lewis Ayres, professor of Catholic and Historical Theology at Durham University in England, has lectured at Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando. Credo editor Matthew Barrett’s The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church bears on its jacket the good words of the Roman professor Matthew Levering, a central figure in the ressourcement movement, who says Barrett’s “argument may offer promising ecumenical potential.” Imagine that, a book on the Reformation, and the Romans themselves laud it and say it offers “ecumenical potential”![5] In closing, we might well ask with Lloyd Jones:
What has produced this change? Is there something new? Has there been some new discovery? The answer is, there is nothing new at all. There has been no new discovery.
So it is with us. Rome has repented nothing since 1517 and has only changed tactics in attempting to bring us under her tyranny. As with the Anglicans in 1977, so with many evangelicals today. These men have forgotten that false teachers come in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15); that bad company ruins good morals (1 Cor. 15:33); that Rome and the East have buried the gospel in human tradition (Matt. 15:1-6) and idolatry; that God curses those that alter the gospel (Gal. 1:6-9);[6] and so many other things that we might say unto them: “about this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing” (Heb. 5:12). Heartbreaking, all of it, and we should pray God will grant repentance (2 Tim. 2:25) and raise up witnesses (Matt. 9:35-38), lest he remove the church from our lands (Rev. 2:5) and give us over to unbelief and falsehood (2 Thess 2:11) in punishment for such compromise with the false teaching of Rome and the East (Rev. 2:14-16; 20-23).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks/Simpsonville (Greenville Co.), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation.
[1] Boersma is ordained in the Anglican Church in North America
[2] This is a slight reworking of what I have written elsewhere on this topic: https://tomhervey.substack.com/p/across-the-tiber-and-into-the-cloister#_ftn1
[3] Not to be mistaken with the more recent United Reformed Churches in North America, which bears a more consistently Reformed character, having largely formed out of the Christian Reformed Church in response to scripturally unfaithful developments in her midst in the 1990s.
[4] A reference to the Great Ejection of 1662, in which 2,000 Puritans were cast from their pulpits by the English government.
[5] Boersma similarly honored J.I. Packer as “a great Puritan,” not because, like the original Puritans, he worked for a pure doctrine, worship, and church that was purified of Romish and other errors, but because of his “ecumenical conviction” that “drove him to irenic dialogue with Catholics and Orthodox in the 1990s” and recognized such as “fellow Christians who upheld the church’s Great Tradition.”
[6] As many do when they say things like “the gospel is indispensable for addressing the complex social, cultural, and political challenges facing the nation,” thus contradicting Jesus’ claim that his “kingdom is not of this world” (Jn. 18:36). If his kingdom is not of this world, how could the gospel of that kingdom be concerned with worldly cares like political and social challenges? Only if one distorts the meaning of that gospel and the nature of that kingdom can it be so.