Recently Carl Trueman posted some comments regarding Frank Beckwith's return to the Catholic Church. I want to say first that I appreciate Carl's gracious and charitable treatment of Frank. Some of the comments in the combox on Frank's site fell short of that a bit. But Carl's article is especially commendable in that respect.

I do take issue with a couple things Carl writes. At one point he says, "But to argue that the patristic authors are more Catholic than Protestant is arguably to impose anachronistic categories upon the first five centuries."

For a Catholic, such a statement is question-begging, because it implies that the Catholic Church began in the sixth century, and that the Church which Christ founded either ceased to exist at least by the end of the fifth century, or continued on after that time as something other than the Catholic Church. Obviously I don't expect Carl to take a Catholic starting position when refuting Catholicism; but logic doesn't look favorably on taking a ~X starting point in order to refute X. :-)

When Carl talks about the justification issue, he says the following:

"But the key differences -- impartation versus imputation, and the instrumentality of faith -- are mutually exclusive. One has got to be wrong, both may be wrong, but both cannot be right."

It seems to me that impartation is not incompatible with imputation. Rather, impartation would be incompatible with "imputation alone". Nothing about impartation excludes imputation. If Christ is truly imparting His righteousness to me, why can't he also be imputing His righteousness to me? Likewise, it seems to me that the Catholic position is not incompatible with "the instrumentality of faith", but rather with the claim that "only faith is instrumental" (not to be confused with ["faith alone" can be instrumental], which the Catholic Church accepts, since it affirms the salvation of the thief on the cross, maintaining that through his faith (revealed in his words) he obtained what is called a "baptism of desire" and entrance into the kingdom of heaven).

On the issue of assurance, I think Carl treats the "Protestant teaching" as though it were identical to the Reformed position (if there is indeed just one Reformed position on assurance). But in my experience many Protestants hold a position on this issue that is closer to the Catholic position than the Reformed position. I simply wouldn't refer to *the* Protestant view on assurance.

Regarding the issue of justification Carl writes,

"But, if Beckwith genuinely sees Scripture as ambiguous or unclear on this, he is right to return to Rome:"

Carl writes as though he is unaware of the historical and present disagreements within Protestantism on this issue. Must a Protestant either (1) imagine that all other Protestants agree with him on justification, or (2) believe that those Protestants disagreeing with him on justification are so benighted that they cannot even understand what is unambiguous and clear, in order to avoid the need for the Catholic Church? That looks to me like an argument *for*, not *against*, the Catholic Church.

Carl dismisses the notion that the Catholic Church is historically and theologically continuous with the early church as "romantic". But I wonder whether the view he implies is not itself more properly described as ecclesiastically deistic and cynical. What exactly happened to the Church Christ founded? Did Christ abandon it such that the gates of hell prevailed against it and it ceased to exist at some point in time, or did Christ found only an invisible Church (i.e. the set of all believers)? It is not enough to dismiss the Catholic position as "romantic"; some alternative account needs to be supplied. (Maybe he has done so elsewhere, and I am simply unaware of it.)

In his "shot across the bows", he goes after papal authority, writing:

"I know of no more practically flexible and ultimately meaningless notion of authority than that which has historically been practiced by the papacy."

It is hard to know whether "practically flexible" is a praise or complaint, so I won't touch it. But neither do I have any idea what to make of "ultimately meaningless notion of authority". The claim that a concept or idea is "meaningless" is sometimes an attempt to claim that the concept in question is nonsensical or incoherent or unintelligible. Sometimes it reduces to "I don't understand it." Or does he mean that he thinks that papal authority is ineffectual at the local level? I could speculate, but I would rather wait for clarification. If the notion of papal authority is, in his view, too ineffectual, then it is hard to see how the issue of papal authority could still be a justifying reason for remaining in schism with the Catholic Church. Surely he isn't holding out for a stronger pope! Of course, the very idea of being in schism by being separated (in some respect) from the Catholic Church, imports that 'romantic' notion of the Church that he rejects. But if the Church is the Bride of Christ, shouldn't we expect some romance! :-)

I was especially fascinated by the last paragraph in Trueman's article,. I think it is, unfortunately, a rather accurate diagnosis of the state of the ETS, a state that (in my view and in Newman's) inevitably follows from rejecting Church authority, including the authority of the very first Ecumenical Councils.