Analyzing R.C. Sproul’s “Are We Together?” (Part 1)

Introduction // At Stake: The Gospel

R.C. Sproul is one of my favorite Protestants to read or listen to. I have always enjoyed his whimsical, dynamic, and smart rhetoric. He also had that hard to find quality of being fair and consistent.

In a multi-part series, I will be working my way through Sproul’s 2012 book, Are We Together? A Protestant Analyzes Roman Catholicism. His basic thesis: No, the Reformation is not over and it shouldn’t be.

The simple question I bring to the book is: Does Sproul have an objection Catholics can’t overcome?

To feel justified remaining Protestant, I need to find a highly consequential and clear objection Roman Catholics can’t reasonably overcome.

As my question hints at, I think the onus is on a Protestant to justify their protest. Here are two reasons why I think that. First, Roman Catholics hold the historical high ground in the west. Catholicism preceded its protesting little brother by about 1500 years. Being the historically novel form of Christianity, Protestantism needs to have an incredibly strong case against its long time predecessor (I know Orthodox Christians and a small group of others hold similar historical credentials also, but Sproul is focused on Roman Catholicism in this book — so I will continue to use the term Catholic and Catholicism as short hand periodically throughout my analysis.).

Second, Christianity is a religion that requires some form of interpretive tradition to make sense of it. Only the naive think they stand outside of a tradition. This means Christians ultimately have to choose an interpretive tradition to trust. All things being equal, Catholicism having the historical high ground gives it a privileged position when determining a tradition to trust.

Because of those reasons, it’s not good enough to casually continue rejecting Roman Catholicism because I don’t like something about it or prefer a different kind of Christianity. To feel justified remaining Protestant, I need to find a highly consequential and clear objection Roman Catholics can’t reasonably overcome.

So, my goal in this analysis is to find such an objection. I’ll work to capture the essence of each chapter by following Sproul’s key points on each page. I’ll then interact and provide my take.

With that said, let’s begin.

Introduction // At Stake: The Gospel

Page 1

“The Gospel of Jesus Christ is always at risk of distortion… It became distorted… leading up to the Protestant Reformation…

There are two sides to the gospel… an objective side and a subjective side. The objective… is the person and work of Jesus. The subjective is… how the benefits of Christ’s work are appropriated to the believer.”

… the core matter, the material issue of the Reformation, was the gospel, especially the doctrine of justification…”

I think it’s important to keep this in mind as we traverse the other various issues Sproul will raise against Catholicism. There is a material cause that stands above all others. It’s not the objective side of who Jesus is and what he did. The disagreement rests with the subjective side. Particularly the doctrine of justification — or how the benefits of Christ’s work are appropriated to the believer.

Pages 2–3

“The Reformers… taught that we are justified by faith alone. Faith, they said, is the sole instrumental cause for our justification… we receive all the benefits of Jesus’ work through putting our trust in Him alone.

The Roman communion also taught that faith is a necessary condition for salvation… faith is the beginning of justification, the foundation for justification, and the root of justification. But… a person can have true faith and still not be justified… Mortal sin… kills the grace of justification. The sinner then must be justified a second time.

The fundamental difference was… Trent said that God does not justify anyone until real righteousness inheres within the person… justification depends on a person’s sanctification. By contrast, the Reformers said justification is based on the imputation of the righteousness of Jesus.”

Ok. Faith, in the mind of the Reformers, is somehow unable to be taken back. This is a sort of faith that triggers a one-time event; an “imputation” of Christ’s righteousness (we’ll find out more about this later).

As Sproul mentions, the Catholic view allows for the loss of justification (i.e., someone can change their mind via mortal sin) because “God does not declare a person righteous unless he or she is righteous.”

Here is a summary of the two views:

PROTESTANT
You are declared fully justified when Christ’s righteousness is imputed to you.

CATHOLIC
You are declared fully justified when Christ’s righteousness inheres within you.

There it is. 500 years of protest is materially built on the difference between imputing and inhering. While it is quite esoteric and abstract, it does have an important consequence. The Protestant formulation means salvation, once had, can’t be lost. The Catholic formulation means that salvation can be lost via committing mortal sin.

Sproul goes on:

“These were radically different views of salvation… One of them was the gospel. One of them was not…

… the Council of Trent declared justification by faith alone to be anathema, ignoring many plain teachings of Scripture, such as Romans 3:28: “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”

To call the Council of Trent basically ignorant for anathematizing justification by faith alone is a bit ironic. Two quick points. First, does Romans 3:28 say we are justified by faith alone? No. It says we are justified apart from “works of the law” — almost certainly a reference to the law of Moses.

Second, does James 2:24 say we are justified by faith alone? No. It literally reads, “You see a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” So, the supposedly ignorant council just went with the language the Bible went with.

It seems the Reformers were ignoring, or at minimum wanted to ignore explicit texts — not the other way around.

Pages 3–8

“I think the biggest crisis over the purity of the gospel that I have experienced… was the initiative known as Evangelicals & Catholics Together (ECT, 1994)… Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders wanted to join hands to speak as Christians united against… moral decay and relativism. All that was fine.

… in the middle of the ECT document, the framers said, ‘We affirm together that we are justified by grace through faith because of Christ’… this statement went too far.

It was followed by ECT II: The Gift of Salvation (1997)… in my judgement, this document was far worse than the first one because the framers were willing to maintain their assertion of the unity of faith in the gospel without affirming imputation… imputation is, for me, the nonnegotiable.

In 2009, a new document was released, The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience… the signers included evangelical, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox adherents. It was similar… to the ECT initiative… it gave the same blanket endorsement of Rome as a Christian body… This document confuses the gospel and obscures the distinction between who is and is not a Christian. I do not believe that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are preaching the same gospel that evangelicals preach.

One of the ironies of ECT was that… the framers wanted to overcome relativism in the culture. However, they ended up relativizing… the gospel.”

This section is interesting. It again reaffirms “imputation” as the reason Sproul, and others, couldn’t sign these ecumenical documents. It’s the nonnegotiable of the Reformation — except for the Protestants that did sign of course.

Sproul also clarifies that it’s not just Roman Catholics who are preaching a different gospel. Orthodox Christians are implicated as well. This means the two oldest bodies of Christians somehow needed the insight of Martin Luther — 1500 years after Christ — to get the gospel right. Forgive me, I’m skeptical of that claim.

He continues:

“I think ECT and similar efforts… are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of where the Roman Catholic Church is theologically… the Roman Catholic Church has changed… but the changes have not closed the gap… indeed the differences are greater now.

… a 2005 book actually asked, ‘Is the Reformation Over?’… my response… is that the authors did not understand either the Reformation , Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, or all three…

The indisputable fact is that Rome made… clear theological affirmations at the Council of Trent. Because Trent was an ecumenical council, it had all the weight of the infallibility of the church behind it… Rome… cannot repeal the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent.”

Sproul is right about that. More doctrines (papal infallibility, immaculate conception of Mary, etc.) have been defined in the 500 years since the Reformation, and Trent was pretty clear in her response to the Reformers — affirming when they could and anathematizing when they couldn’t.

Page 9–10

“In this book, I have a simple goal. I want to look at Roman Catholic teaching in several significant areas and compare it with Protestant teaching.

We begin by looking at the authority of Scripture, which was the formal cause of the Protestant Reformation, then turn to the material cause of the Reformation, the question of justification. Next, we look at the Roman Catholic Church’s notion of the relationship of the visible church to redemption. In chapter 4, we will compare and contrast the Roman Catholic and Protestant views of the sacraments, and then take up the issue of papal infallibility… Finally, we will consider the division of Roman Catholic theology known as ‘Mariology,’ or the study of the place, the role, and the function of the Virgin Mary in the Christian life.

Our task… is to be faithful… to the truth of Scripture. We love the Reformation because the Reformers loved the truth of God… and… they brought about a recovery of the purity of the gospel.”

The idea that a fundamental truth needs “recovery” is a bit of a red flag in this context. It’s got a conspiratorial tinge, while raising a lot of questions. Who lost this fundamental truth? When did they lose it? Why did they lose it? Was it intentional or an accident? How could an idea so fundamental and simple even be lost?

I hope questions like these are interacted with. If Sproul just makes a couple of interpretive and theological arguments to support the position of a tiny minority of Christians who lived 1500 years after Christ, I’m going to be disappointed to say the least — unless the arguments are logically undeniable.

Chapter Takeaways

Sproul makes it clear: The gospel is the material cause of the Reformation, and thus it’s the material cause of his book.

The practical consequence of this focus means the reader should pay very careful attention to the quality of his arguments surrounding justification by faith alone. Is imputation definitively true? Why did this discovery take this long in the course of church history? Is it clear all the New Testament writers thought this? What’s the relationship of faith and works, considering Jesus sets up a lot of working conditions to meet? Is the idea of apostasy — that someone can turn away from the faith — just a ruse?

If his arguments fail to negotiate that sort of labyrinth, then it will significantly compromise his core thesis regarding the gospel being at stake. It would then compromise the bedrock point of the early Protestant Reformation.

But before we get to the all important material cause, Sproul will argue for the formal cause because it precedes all others: the authority of Scripture.

Part 2 of my analysis is coming soon.

If you’d like to purchase, Are We Together? A Protestant Analyzes Roman Catholicism, head over to Amazon.