Time to Make Proper Distinctions

The controversy continues to grow over a movement that styles itself “Reformed Catholicism”; a relatively recent movement, notwithstanding the claims of its adherents to have historical links to the Reformers. One of the adherents of this movement, Paul Owen, has recently written a short article on Galatians 5:2 and sola fide, in which he claims that Galatians offers no support for those who eschew the gospel of Rome as a false gospel that condemns. The article in its entirety can be accessed here: http://www.reformedcatholicism.com/archives/000166.html. 

Owen begins his article by identifying New Testament beliefs that are affirmed as essential beliefs by the New Testament writers themselves; among which are the deity of Christ, the messiahship of Christ, Christ’s incarnation, atonement and resurrection, Christ’s divine sonship, the radical sinfulness of man and the corresponding need for forgiveness. On the negative side of the issue, God denies justification to those who trust (or boast) in their own works for salvation, and those who deny the Trinity.

Beyond these, Owen sees little in the New Testament that allows us to conclude that any other belief is essential to salvation; and in particular, beliefs regarding the instrument of justification: “nowhere does the New Testament say that a particular understanding of the way in which justification is received is necessary for salvation.” Owen continues:

Nowhere does it say that the person who believes that hope and love must be added in order for faith to unite us to Christ, or that baptism is the instrumental cause of justification, cannot be saved. The mechanism of justification is nowhere raised to the same level of priority in the NT as the fundamental truths of Christ's divinity, his death and resurrection, and his incarnate mission.

Owen anticipates a potential objection based on Gal 5:2: "Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you." Owen’s imaginary interlocutor interprets this verse as evidence of condemnation for those who attempt to add even one work to their faith. The faith of such people, in the view of the interlocutor, “cannot save [them] from God’s wrath.” Applied to the current debate, this principle would preclude from salvation any Roman Catholic who believes that water baptism is the instrument of justification, or that hope and love must be added to faith in order to be united to Christ. 

Owen then takes the interlocutor to task for failing to recognize that Paul never denies the Galatians their status as fellow believers, even though there is every indication that they had adopted a false gospel. Rather, Paul addresses them as “brothers,” and continues to deal with them as true Christians. The phrase “Christ will be of no benefit to you” is stated in reference to their current slavery to the law which accompanied their decision to attain righteousness by means of works. This, Owen maintains, is a much more tenable interpretation of Paul’s words. Finally, Owen informs us of the true identity of the interlocutor; he, of course, represents those “Protestant sectarians” who wish to “twist God’s word” and to use Galatians to “beat Roman Catholics into submission.”

A number of objections may be raised against Owen’s view. First, why Owen would choose Gal 5:2 as the representative argument his interlocutor could raise against his position is not readily apparent. He doesn’t cite anyone who has used that passage in just the way his interlocutor uses it, so we are left to conclude that Owen is simply taking the devil’s advocacy on this. Galatians 5:2 is certainly not the first passage I would have chosen to rebut Owen; nor, as Owen has argued, is it one that we need view as particularly relevant to the issue. We can agree with Owen, for the sake of argument, that what Paul has in mind here is the inefficacy of freedom from the law for those who wish to enslave themselves to the law. This is not the only possible interpretation, of course; but questions regarding the exegesis of this verse need not detain us here.

The real problem with Owen’s article is that it cherry picks criteria for what constitutes an essential belief, and that criteria ends up being insufficient to cover the spectrum of what constitutes essential beliefs for Owen himself. Returning for the moment to those beliefs Owen thinks are essential to salvation, he first lists several beliefs (the deity, messiahship, divine sonship of Christ, etc.) that the New Testament writers expressly state must be believed. With these we are in agreement, but on different grounds. Owen believes they are essential because we are commanded to believe them. While a command to believe an apostolic teaching is reason enough to believe it, not all that is essential is found in the form of an imperative.

Owen’s criteria takes him so far; but then he gets to the Trinity—the very belief that he and his associates think is the quintessential belief for determining who is in and who is outside of the covenant. Yet he runs into a snag here because he is forced to acknowledge that there is no express command to believe in the Trinity. Rather, it is a derived command based entirely on the command to baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Hence, Owen must now operate on a slightly different principle for the Trinity than he has for every other essential belief he holds.

Owen takes pains to exclude Mormons at this point, since they don’t believe in the same Trinity as Christians. He explains that since the New Testament church held that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one Triune God, “when Jesus pronounces baptism in the name of those three Persons, this utterance has an intended meaning which would have been understood within the Church.” 

Quite aside from the fact that the Mormon could rightfully charge Owen with begging the question here—how, for instance, does he know that the New Testament church believed the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to be one triune God without going well beyond the text of the derived command in Matthew 28? Such a statement is gratuitous on its face, and can be demonstrated only by taking into consideration the full theology of the New Testament writers—Owen’s exclusion of Mormons on the basis that they are not true “trinitarians” suffers from the same difficulties as the view of sola fide he later criticizes : “Nowhere does the New Testament say that a particular understanding of the way in which justification is received is necessary for salvation.” Very well; neither does the New Testament say that a particular understanding of the way in which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are related is necessary for salvation. To use Owen’s own rationale, “The mechanism of [the Trinity] is nowhere raised to the same level of priority in the NT as the fundamental truths of Christ's divinity, his death and resurrection, and his incarnate mission.” Moreover—and again using the same rationale of Owen—since the New Testament church believed that faith alone justifies and that any admixture of works results in a false gospel, then when Paul pronounces that “by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified,” “this utterance has an intended meaning which would have been understood within the Church.” 

In any case, Owen has used one criteria to determine some essential beliefs (namely, the use of the imperative), but a separate criteria (an a priori appeal to what the New Testament church believed) to determine that belief in the Trinity is also an essential belief. Hence, there can be no objection by Owen to the prospect that there are other beliefs that, though they may not be expressly commanded, are stated in such as way as to make clear (1) they were held by the entire New Testament church, and (2) they were viewed by this same New Testament church as beliefs that are absolutely essential to the Christian faith.

Although we can agree that belief in the Trinity is essential (though not necessarily Nicene’s definition of it), we do not come to that conclusion (contra Owen) based on some supposed derived command in Matthew 28, but rather on the basis of the consistent witness regarding the beliefs of the New Testament writers themselves. Did they believe in the Trinity? is a much better question than, Is belief in the Trinity commanded? As we have already shown above, even Owen himself must abandon his first principle (imperative) and adopt this one at the end of the day.

Yet if the principle for determining essential beliefs is not through command but through example, then that same principle applies with equal force to other New Testament beliefs. This raises the question, Did the New Testament writers believe that faith is the alone instrument of justification before God? I don’t think this is something Owen can deny, since it is a firmly entrenched belief in Classical Reformation theology. Moreover, Is this belief presented by the apostles as of prime importance? The answer is an unequivocal yes. Indeed, Paul goes so far as to say that those who proclaim anything else stand condemned (Gal 1:8-9). Paul would never issue this strong a condemnation regarding secondary issues such as baptism (1 Cor 1:14-17). But he does state it in regard to the alone instrument of justification. Owen’s strange relegation of this issue to some non-essential class of beliefs—regardless of whose view of this is correct, whether Protestants or Roman Catholic (such is a different issue entirely)—is absolutely foreign to the minds of the New Testament writers. Hence, the oft-quoted slogan of the Catholic Reformers, “we are saved by faith alone; not by believing we are saved by faith alone,” is as nonsensical as saying, “we are saved by the Trinity alone; not by believing we are saved by the Trinity alone.” To affirm the latter would allow Mormons—and anyone else for that matter—into the fold, to the chagrin of Owen and his associates.

Another criticism that can be raised against Owen’s article is his failure to make the proper and necessary distinction between the deceiver and the deceived. Owen rightly points out that Paul continues to call his readers “brothers,” in spite of the fact that they had been misled into following a false gospel; but wrongly thinks that this somehow makes his case against the “Protestant sectarians.” I have always argued that the New Testament distinguishes between those who bear, promote, defend and proclaim a false gospel, and those who become the confused, unsuspecting recipients of it.  In the case of the latter, Paul (as well as the other New Testament writers, for that matter) issues warnings and corrections while continuing to address them as brothers; to the former, he issues statements of condemnation and assumes they are lost. I have always maintained a distinction between the promoters of Rome’s false gospel, and the confused recipients in the pews. It is simply not the case that (per Owen’s interlocutor) Roman Catholics by and large “view water baptism as the instrumental cause of justification, and believe that hope and love are also necessary for faith to unite us to Christ”—what layman in the Roman Catholic pew would ever state his faith in these terms? Hence, Owen’s further qualification—namely, “unless of course they are actually doctrinal Protestants who for some reason continue to remain in the RCC”—is actually more commonplace than Owen seems to allow. No one I know has ever asserted that the Roman Catholic layman is lost; he may very well be in the same confused position as the majority of the Galatians. All we have ever asserted is that the Roman Catholic defender (who knows the gospel and has consciously rejected it) is lost—precisely because he is engaged in the same Judaizer activity of proclaiming and upholding a false gospel that Paul says condemns.

Oddly, Owen does not view the addition of Roman Catholic works (such as water baptism) to faith as being in the same category as the Judaizers’ (indeed, the Galatians’) addition of circumcision to faith. But on what basis? Why would the addition of circumcision to faith place the recipients of Paul’s letter in such jeopardy, but the addition of a work such as baptism somehow not? Why would Paul make so much of the principle not to allow circumcision to be used as a means of justification before God, only to allow some other work to be used as a means of justification before God? 

While Owen does not tells us the answer to this, he later gives us a hint of how this works out for him. In a follow-up comment to a responder to his article, Owen reveals his rationale: “It is interesting that Paul never acknowledges that the Judaizing teachers have faith in Christ for justification, though he does acknowledge the faith of the Galatian Christians (3:2; 5:13,25)”

For those unfamiliar with Owen’s past exchanges on this, what Owen is attempting to suggest here is that the “Galatian error” was that the Judaizers were guilty of denying the atonement—not that they were attempting to add works to the gospel of justification by faith in Christ. In other words, these were not (in Owen’s view) true believers in Christ who began propagating the addition of works to faith. Rather they were Jews within the Christian community who denied that Jesus’ death accomplished anything in the plan of redemption.

It must be pointed out here that Owen’s reconstruction goes against the consensus of reputable scholarship on Galatians. No other New Testament scholar I know of holds that the Galatian errorists were strict Jews who denied the messiahship or Jesus or the atonement resulting from his death. So Owen’s point here seems to be based entirely on a tenuous reconstruction of the historical background of Galatians.

Yet, historically we know that the Judaizers professed a belief in Christ. In Acts 15:1, we are told that these Judaizers were insisting that the Gentiles be circumcised in order to be saved. This was not the polemic of the Jew who rejected Christ. Indeed, the Jews who rejected Christ in Jerusalem were interested only in stopping the preaching of the gospel—not in making sure that Gentile believers in Christ were circumcised! In Acts 15:5, these men are called “the sect of the Pharisees who had believed.” They again insisted that the Gentile believers must be circumcised: “It is necessary to circumcise them, and to direct them to observe the Law of Moses." Since as Beasley-Murray (Baptism Today and Tomorrow, 94-95) has observed elsewhere, there were no unbaptized believers in the New Testament church, we must assume that these men were not only baptized believers in Christ, but, because they had been invited to speak at the Jerusalem council, they must have been men who (at least at that time) were fully embraced by the church. These same men are the ones Paul refers to as “men from James” and “the party of the circumcision” in Gal 2:12, and “false brothers” in 2:4.

Moreover, Owen’s reconstruction does not account for Paul’s specific statements regarding circumcision. Indeed, in the very passage that makes up part of the title for Owen’s article (Gal 5:2), Paul has this to say:

Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace. (Gal 5:2-4)

Paul’s burden here is to convince his readers to avoid circumcision as a means to justification. There is nothing in the text that would lead us to believe his burden is to correct a faulty view of the atonement. It is assumed that the Galatians would still believe in Christ, even if they adopted circumcision along with their faith. Indeed, even in a strictly Jewish context, it would be absolutely necessary to exercise faith in the Messiah in addition to anything else they might do to win God’s favor, such as receiving circumcision. To posit with Owen that there were Jews running around the first-century world, telling people they must be circumcised but that circumcision does not need to be accompanied by faith in God, Messiah, or both, and that these Jews as a result were not quite Jews and not quite Christians either—and that they are properly and historically called Judaizers—is not only absurd on its face, but it contradicts the scholarly consensus on this issue. As a New Testament scholar, Owen is entitled to posit a new view. But merely introducing a new view is no guarantee of its adoption; and someone who has not yet introduced his view to the rigorous examination of New Testament scholarship should be all the more tentative of pinning too much on it. At the end of the day, there is nothing about Owen’s reconstruction that persuades us to adopt it and to jettison established scholarship.

I should address one final point Owen makes. In his list of possible things that could be added to faith in the Roman Catholic system, Owen mentions “hope” and “love.” Yet, properly speaking, the New Testament presents hope and love as bound up in faith and as so radically part of faith that we cannot remove them and still have true, saving faith. As a popular Reformation slogan goes, we are justified by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone. Faith is not mere naked assent to facts. It is rather a life-changing commitment to Christ based on those facts, and it is always tied inextricably to hope and love. 

Moreover, in addition to baptism, hope and love, Owen has neglected to mention a host of other works that Roman Catholics are required to perform for their justification—such as partaking of the sacraments, attending mass, submitting to the pope—things they must do to maintain and increase their justification before God. Hence, when Owen presents his “Protestant sectarian” interlocutor as denying justification to a Roman Catholic who sees hope and love as necessary to be saved, he is tearing down a straw man. The Roman Catholic system of earning justification before God is far more involved and includes many more meritorious works than anything the Judaizers were foisting upon the Galatians. Therefore, by accepting the Roman Catholic defender into the fold and granting him the covenant status of "brother," Owen, a fortiori, must likewise accept the Galatian errorist into the fold regardless of the fact that the apostle condemns him in unequivocal terms. 

Eric Svendsen, Ph.D.
Director, NTRMin.org