BeggersAll - Catholicism and Semi-Pelagianism per Sproul

In a blog comment at BeggarsAll, Ken Temple states:

R. C. Sproul demonstrates the contradiction in Roman Catholic Theology, when it claims it agrees with Augustine against Pelagius and the Semi-Pelagians (Provincial Synod of Orange in 529 AD), but later re-affirms Semi-Pelagianism by the decrees of Trent (1545-1563) and then, later, arguably, it approves of even Pelagianism by the condemnation of the Jansenists (roughly, 1638-1713) and the modern Roman Catholic Catechism of 1994.  Sproul calls it an "ambiguity".  Indeed, it is more than that; it is a real contradiction.  It also shows the Roman Catholic Church to be fallible; thus bringing down the whole system of its claim to be infallible.

Embedded Ken has a video with Dr. RC Sproul wherein Sproul makes the statement that the Catholic Church has theological hemophilia, and if you scratch her, she bleeds to death.  That is, since the Catholic Church claims to be infallible, if one can demonstrate a contradiction in infallible teachings - then infallibility is destroyed - "she bleeds to death."  In the video Sproul deals with the matter of Free Will and Original Sin.  

Sproul starts by explaining (briefly) what Pelagianism is and how St. Augustine opposed it.  He also explains what Jansenism is, and how the Catholic Church opposed it.  For a bit more clarity, let's explain those a bit more here:

Pelagianism views humanity as basically good and morally unaffected by the Fall. It denies the imputation of Adam's sin, original sin, total depravity, and substitutionary atonement. It simultaneously views man as fundamentally good and in possession of libertarian free will. With regards to salvation, it teaches that man has the ability in and of himself (apart from divine aid) to obey God and earn eternal salvation. Pelagianism is overwhelmingly incompatible with the Bible and was historically opposed by Augustine (354-430), Bishop of Hippo, leading to its condemnation as a heresy at Council of Carthage in 418 A.D. These condemnations were summarily ratified at the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431). http://www.theopedia.com/Pelagianism
Jansenism was a Christian theological movement, primarily in France, that emphasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity ofdivine grace, and predestination. 

St. Augustine opposed Pelagianism in this respect:

These men are such opponents of the grace of God . . . that without it, as they believe, man can do all the commandments of God. They confess in this way there is given to us divine knowledge whereby ignorance is dispelled, but they deny that love is given to us whereby we may lead a religious life: so that whereas knowledge, which, without love puffeth up, is the gift of God, love itself, which edifieth so that knowledge should not puff up, is not the gift of God. They empty of their meaning the prayers which the Church makes: whether for the unbelieving and those that refused the doctrine of God, that they may return to God; or for the faithful, that faith may be increased in them and that they may persevere therein. They even go so far as to say that the life of the righteous in this world has no sin, and thus the Church of Christ in this mortal state is so perfected as to be altogether “without spot or wrinkle. ” As if it were not the Church of Christ throughout the world which cries to God, “Forgive us our trespasses.” They also deny that infants, born according to Adam after the flesh, contract by their first [sc. Natural] birth the infection of the ancient death. So they assert that they are born without any bond of original sin: with the result, of course, that there is in them nothing that has to be released at their Second [or New] Birth. The reason why they are baptized is that by their New Birth they be adopted and admitted into the kingdom of God, carried from good to better—not, by that renewal, delivered from any evil of ancient entail. For even if they are not baptized, they promise them eternal life and bliss of a sort, though not within the kingdom of God. Adam also himself, they say, even if he had not sinned, would have undergone bodily death; though, if he so died, it would have been due not to the deserts of his guilt, but to the conditions of his nature. Several other things are charged against them. But these are especially the points on which it may be understood how all, or nearly all, the rest depend. http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/public/augustine_on_pelagianism.htm

So in summary, St. Augustine supports that in order for men to fulfill the commandments of God they must have His grace in them; that love (grace) is the gift of God; that the Church of Christ does have blemishes and cries out to God "Forgive us our trespasses;" that Original Sin does exist and we must be regenerated through baptism; and that the sin of Adam indeed brought about his death.  These things the Pelagians denied - and these things the Catholic Church taught and continues to teach (to this day!).

The "critical point" according to Dr. Sproul is that he states man still has the ability to choose evil or good, even after the fall.  He goes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and while he does not cite the paragraph, I have it here for you:

1731 Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility. By free will one shapes one's own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.
1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.

Two things here in answering Dr. Sproul: 
a) The CCC is not an infallible document/book/teaching from the Church - NO catechism is!  
b) Paragraph 1732 is saying that men who are not bound definitively to God can still choose to do good things.  There is nothing wrong with that statement!  It is not saying that such men are doing salvific things, only that they are still free to choose to do good things over doing evil things.  Many "unregenerate" people do many good things - there just is no "good" for them in God's eyes, outside of His grace.

So, even if Paragraph 1732 were in error here (and it is not) it would not be valid ammunition against the Church's teaching (really Christ's teaching, Matthew 16:18-19 and Matthew 18:18) because NO catechism has ever been promulgated as an infallible document.  Again, there is no contradiction between what St. Augustine said and what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says - if anything, the CCC is saying that when one binds himself to God that his will is no longer "free" - that he is now bound to do good, and the choice to do evil would separate him from the love (grace) of God.  This is consistent Catholic teaching throughout the ages.

I have one more thing for Dr. Sproul and Mr. Temple in this regard...

A Response to Tota Scriptura

The following is a response to R.C. Sproul, Sr.'s article on "tota scriptura," a variation on "sola scruptura."

Tota Scriptura
by R.C. Sproul (Sr.)

In centuries past, the church was faced with the important task of recognizing which books belong in the Bible. 

This subject, the canon, is answered several times already on the CathApol Blog, but Sproul Sr's spin on this is worth taking another look at it.  An important part of the wording here, perhaps a Freudian slip, "the church was faced with the important task of recognizing which books belong in the Bible."  The canon is not explicitly expressed in Scripture, rather it comes to us by the Holy Ghost through His Church.  It is interesting to note that Sproul states that it was "the church" which was "faced with the important task..."  Most Protestants have a real hard time admitting that this responsibility was left to the Church, so kudos for Dr. Sproul in this regard. 

The Bible itself is not a single book but a collection of many individual books. What the church sought to establish was what we call the canon of sacred Scripture. 

Agreed.

The word canon comes from a Greek word that means “standard or measuring rod.” So the canon of sacred Scripture delineates the standard that the church used in receiving the Word of God. As is often the case, it is the work of heretics that forces the church to define her doctrines with greater and greater precision.
 

Agreed!  

We saw the Nicene Creed as a response to the heresy of Arius in the fourth century, and we saw the Council of Chalcedon as a response to the fifth-century heresies of Eutyches and Nestorius, with respect to the church’s understanding of the person of Christ. In like manner, the first list of canonical books of the New Testament that we have was produced by a heretic named Marcion.Marcion’s New Testament was an expurgated version of the original biblical documents. Marcion was convinced that the God of the Old Testament was at best a demiurge (a creator god who is the originator of evil) who in many respects is defective in being and character. Thus, any reference to that god in the New Testament in a positive relationship to Jesus had to be edited out. And so we receive from Marcion a bare-bones profile of Jesus and His teaching, divorced from the Old Testament. Over against this heresy, the church had to define the full measure of the apostolic writings, which they did in establishing the New Testament and Old Testament canon.
 

Marcion was a figure in the Early Church in the early to mid second century.  His heresy was more related to his belief in the God of the Old Testament being evil and Jesus was the God of the New Testament who came to destroy the God of the Old Testament.  He was also quite anti-Jewish (as were many in the Early Church) and saw no value in the Jewish Scriptures of what Christians call the Old Testament.  The fact that Marcion's New Testament canon was different from other canons of the day is not really a unique matter - as there were several canons in existence.  Some of the books which were widely accepted as canonical in the first century, even into the 4th century, included books like the Epistles of St. Clement (the third pope after St. Peter) which were eventually excluded from the final canon of the Christian Church.  So again, the canon variation of Marcion was not really the reason he was branded a heretic - though he really did butcher the Christian canon.

Another crisis emerged much later in the sixteenth century, in the midst of the Protestant Reformation. Though the central debate, what historians call the material cause of the Reformation, focused on the doctrine of justification, the underlying dispute was the secondary issue of authority. In Luther’s defense of sola fide or faith alone, he was reminded by the Roman Catholic Church that she had already made judgments in her papal encyclicals and in her historical documents in ways that ran counter to Luther’s theses. And in the middle of that controversy, Luther affirmed the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura, namely that the conscience is bound by sacred Scripture alone, that is, the Bible is the only source of divine, special revelation that we have. In response, the Roman Catholic Church at the fourth session of the Council of Trent declared that God’s special revelation is contained both in sacred Scripture and in the tradition of the church. This position, called a dual-source view of revelation, was reaffirmed by subsequent papal encyclicals. And so we see the dispute between Scripture alone versus Scripture plus tradition. In that controversy, the issue had to do with something that was an addition to the Bible, namely, the church’s tradition.

I find it a bit ironic that Sproul prefaces the above paragraph with the fact that dogmatic definitions in the Church most often are in response to heresy/heretics - and this paragraph opens by pointing out the "crisis" which "emerged much later in the sixteenth century, in the midst of the Protestant Reformation."  Moreover, the subject he opens with is that of the Canon of Sacred Scripture - which is also dogmatically defined in the Fourth Session of the Council of Trent! 

Since that time, the opposite problem has emerged, and that is not so much the question of what is added to Scripture, but rather what has been subtracted from it. We face now an issue not of Scripture addition but of Scripture reduction. The issue that we face in our day is not merely the question of sola Scriptura but also the question of tota Scriptura, which has to do with embracing the whole counsel of God as it is revealed in the entirety of sacred Scripture. There have been many attempts in the last century to seek a canon within the canon. That is to say, restricted portions of Scripture are deemed as God’s revelation, not the whole of Scripture. In this case, we have seen movements that have been described by historians as neo-Marcionite. That is, the activity of canon reduction sought by the heretic Marcion in the early church has now been replicated in our day.

Now of course we, Catholics, say that this neo-Marcionite activity began with the "Reformers" who removed seven books from the accepted canon of the Old Testament.  That canon which was codified at the Council of Trent, was originally stated by several local councils in the late 4th Century (Councils of Hippo, Carthage and Rome) and every approved translation of Scripture from that time forward included the total canon, or perhaps I should say was the tota scriptura.  The "Reformers" (I put that word in quotes, because they truly didn't "reform" anything, they formed "new" churches) removed from the canon that which Catholics refer to as the Deuterocanonicals.  Protestants often erroneously call these books "The Apocrypha," but that is a misnomer.  Apocrypha means "hidden" books, and the Deuterocanonicals were never "hidden" - they are simply the "second" (hence "deutero") canon.  What we, Catholics, would call "apocryphal" might be many of the books which were not known for many years and yet are (sometimes falsely) attributed to earlier, even apostolic authors and many are considered Gnostic writings.  Some books, however, are not questioned for the authenticity of the author, such as the Epistles of St. Clement, our third pope after St. Peter, but did not meet the canon criteria set forth by the Church through the Holy Ghost.

Perhaps most famous for this in the twentieth century was the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who made a significant distinction between what he called kerygma and myth. He taught that the Scriptures contained truths of historical value and of theological value that were salvific in their content, but that those truths were hidden and contained within a husk of mythology. For the Bible to be relevant to modern man, it must be demythologized. The husks must be broken in order that the kernel of truth buried under the mythological husk can be brought to the surface. 

 

Beyond the radical reductionism of Bultmann, we have seen more recently attempts among professing evangelicals, and even within the Reformed community, to seek a different type of reduction of Scripture. We have seen views of so-called “limited inspiration” or “limited inerrancy.” That is to say, the Spirit’s inspiration of the Bible is not holistic, but rather is limited to matters of faith and doctrine. In this scenario, proponents suggest we can distinguish between doctrinal matters that are of divine origin and what the Bible teaches in matters of science and history, and, in some cases, ethics. Therefore, there are portions within the Bible that are not equally inspired by God. In this case, we see the reappearance of a canon within a canon. The problem that arises is a serious one. Perhaps most severe is the question, who is it who decides what part of the Bible really belongs to the canon? Once we remove ourselves from a view of tota Scriptura, we are free then to pick and choose what portions of Scripture are normative for Christian faith and life, just like picking cherries from a tree.
 

And this would PRECISELY be the reason why Christians should reject "the Protestant Canon!"  Men who LEFT the authority of the Catholic Church in the 16th century in their own neo-Marcionite way decided to remove the Deuterocanonical books from the Canon of Sacred Scripture.  Certainly they have rationalizations as to why they did this, but what they lack is the AUTHORITY to do it!

 

To do this we would have to revisit the teaching of Jesus, wherein He said that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We would have to change it, to have our Lord say that we do not live by bread alone but by only some of the words that come to us from God. In this case, the Bible is reduced to the status where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. This is an issue that the church has to face in every generation, and it has reappeared today in some of the most surprising places. We’re finding, in seminaries that call themselves Reformed, professors advocating this type of canon within the canon. The church must say an emphatic “no” to these departures from orthodox Christianity, and she must reaffirm her faith not only in sola Scriptura, but in tota Scriptura as well.
 

Again, in order for Dr. Sproul's position to be consistent, he would need to reject the "Protestant Canon" and accept the "Catholic Canon" as decreed by the Council of Trent, which was first put forth by the Councils of Cathage, Hippo and Rome in the late 4th century - and was used by St. Jerome in the translation of Scripture into the Vulgate (common tongue) about the same time. 

From Ligonier Ministries and R.C. Sproul. © Tabletalk magazine. Website: www.ligonier.org/tabletalk. Email: tabletalk@ligonier.org. Toll free: 1-800-435-4343.
 

Permission to use this article is granted so long as the wording is not altered, which I have not done - in fact, Dr. Sproul's wording is complete here.  I have simply inserted my response/rebuttal to his words, which is also permissible based upon "Fair Use" according to copyright law.