Therefore the IF qualifier is important.
In your previous post you said the IF qualifier is meanigless.
Can’t you make up your mind?
I’m saying the if qualifier is meaningless in the sense that it does not make a difference in how Protestants embrace and understand faith alone. It seems many Catholics think the word if changes Pope Benedict’s view of faith alone, seperating the Pope’s view of faith alone from what Protestants embrace as faith alone. I’m saying that if doesn’t change things into a different faith alone. Here is the article from Christianity Today saying the same thing that I’m trying to share.
Eleven years after that document was written, the Pope, the head of the church, concluded his homily by saying Luther was right, so long as you don’t exclude charity, that is love, and the works that flow from love.
Which of course none of us does.
Almost at the same time that statement was issued, the two Catholics who were willing to say they agreed with what the reformers meant when they said sola fide died. It’s as if “Okay, you finished your task. The big issue that divided us in the Reformation has now been settled, so you guys can come home and rest.”
It’s a little bit eerie. The two of them going just weeks apart does not suggest to me that God does not care about the continuing work of ECT but that the first major breakthrough had been accomplished. It’s amazing timing.
Do the Catholics in ECT right now take the same position on justification as Neuhaus and Dulles?
Oh yes. There are probably 12 to 13 other Catholic [leaders] who hold that position.
And now of course the Pope holds it, so it almost doesn’t matter who else holds it, in the way the Catholic Church is structured.
All shifts that take place in Catholicism happen very gradually. Vatican II was an exception. That’s not the way in which theological development occurs within the catholic communion. It occurs in a gradual process in which the pope, and in this case, a cardinal and a couple priests see a way to express something differently and they would argue that there’s no change.
Of course, if you compare it with Trent, there’s a profound change. But they would see it as the development of doctrine. And if it’s contrary to some church council — as this was, clearly — then nothing happens immediately.
Cardinal [Edward] Cassidy took “The Gift of Salvation”] back to the Vatican in 1997 and was teaching it to the bishops. It sort of percolated through the church, and the Pope, who — significantly — was an Augustinian, picked it up. And then a decade later, it ended up in the catechism. That’s just the way change occurs in the Catholic Church.
christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/januaryweb-only/103-51.0.html
Pointless. The “if” qualifier is clearly important. It means that there are conditions to what comes before the “if”. As I said in the other thread, it is misleading to leave out what comes after “if”.