The Influence of Modernism on Catholicism and Presbyterianism

[Music] welcome to christ to center your weekly conversation of reformed theology this is episode number 715 i think my name is camden busey i think i'm in gray's lake illinois and uh i'm excited to be back i have with me today jim cassidy who's pastor of south austin opc in south austin texas hey jim how's it going are you sure that's who i am and where i'm from i don't know or do you think i've been in a different continent so yeah that this this is why it's uh all you're reorienting yeah i'm reacclimating you know my brain is still somewhat getting used to english again after being immersed in in the uh latin culture in colombia so it's been a good time so i've been back for about a little well not quite not two weeks but a week and a half and so i'm still trying to catch up with all sorts of projects and emails and requests and other things that have been looming and piling up as i was gone i was uh traveling in uh colombia south america i people are like where are you going to travel or i'd say i've been i was in colombia they're like i love south south carolina i'm like no that's colombia with the you different one i was down in south america uh with opc foreign missions uh i was there for 12 days total teaching uh two conferences and uh visiting two different churches in two different cities uh on the lord's day with doug clawson who is associate general secretary for foreign missions for the opc he also serves as a board member here at reformed forum and uh you've been down to columbia with him too haven't you i have yeah it's been if you could believe it it's been two and a half years now um since since i was there and some very dear brethren uh there in in bogota that i had a chance to meet i knew that you um you went to different places other than bogota i went to bogota but yeah we did two spots yeah i was just in bogota so i only met the saints there but uh yeah uh dear dear brethren great church and doing really good ministry and work in that area and it was a pleasure uh to teach on on van till when i was down there that's amazing i i can't say enough uh about my my trip and uh just getting to meet uh the brothers and sisters in christ down there and participate just in worship it was amazing just to go to two worship services um broaden my vision of christ's work and in his kingdom even though technically we're in the same time zone i don't know if they call at the same time zone but there's no adjustment from where i live near chicago which relatively made that somewhat easy i could call home and you know the over the wi-fi and the hotel and whatnot and there wasn't you know the kind of adjustment that there would have been if i went off to china for australia or something but um just to be in a completely different type of culture still very western still modern city i mean they're 10 million people in bogota and uh to participate in that uh it was delightful and wonderful but um yeah it was it was kind of life changing life shaping i've only been outside the united states well technically two other times once very briefly my parents took me to tijuana that's another story uh for a different day when i was two i think they were on the run from the authorities or something i'm gonna get a text from my mom when she listens to this and correct me that she's gonna be upset that i cast aspersions on their legal record um anyway uh and the other time um i think in o6 it was either oh five or oh six i traveled to ukraine so to to vis to to travel with uh someone who's on the board of a seminary over there so i was just kind of a tag along travel partner and it was it was wonderful to be in a different continent and to communicate with other people and to visit worship service in a different culture so now you know being 41 years old i get another trip to get down to south america i wish i would have done it a long time ago how did you feel after making the trip and then coming home yeah i wasn't gone nearly as long as you were uh you were you were like a week and a half gone i think almost two weeks yeah and so that's that takes a lot out of you and uh i was i mean i was tired i was also invigorated by many things of course i had had a great time had a blast and teaching and all of that so it was probably three or four nights you know where you go to bed and you still are having your brain is still uh in colombia and you're still thinking about the people there and you're thinking you know so it was um it was a you know you had to decompress i think over some time but it was great it was it was a joy and i was welcomed and uh it's an absolutely beautiful country and the food is amazing yes oh you know it's when you go to a place like that you're yes you're you're not you're not suffering uh let's put it to you that way you're not you're not out in the middle of the desert somewhere or uh someplace where it's uh poverty um stricken or something it's uh i'm not saying there isn't poverty uh public poverty and um colombia there is but um the place is where we were it just was you know just so beautiful and comfortable and the food was great coffee was awesome so yeah i got to go to a coffee plantation a cultivo they call it and see shade grown coffee under bukoro trees uh on top of a mountain so i was more than a mile high in elevation you know drinking coffee where it was grown it's surreal and then uh in bogota i got to uh go up to the to maserati i imagine i i know you were or lane or both of you have been up there and that's ten thousand four hundred foot elevation so the city of bogota is eighty six hundred feet which is high enough uh i you know i was kind of half expecting in the morning on my of my first full day to when i was running on the treadmill that i'd probably pass out but i didn't i survived but getting on top of that mountain and just looking down at the city it was i i've never experienced anything like that i mean i come from land of 500 foot elevation and it's flat you know and to be on top not just of a mountain like we might have in the united states but 10 400 feet and just with that climate and everything just green mountains too not rocky mountains or just piles of rock but just lush covered in vegetation and forest even up to 10 400 feet and no snow this is a bizarre i mean the andes mountains it's just something to behold so i hope to go back sometime but i should mention uh you know we're going to have doug claussen on uh hopefully in a couple weeks and we'll we'll talk in more detail about what we're actually doing and what the strategy of the opc foreign missions is and his history of involvement not just in south america but the the opc's involvement around the world doug heads up as part of his responsibility as associate general secretary heads up something called the mobile theological mentoring corps which in effect is opc foreign missions uh well doug and others will take perhaps you know a professor or instructor of some sort to a foreign mission field and then they will teach on a subject at a conference so these conferences are typically organized and run by local churches that are ideally organized into presbyteries and uh down the road we hope that they would be organized into denominations that have ecumenical fellowship with the with the opc and would in turn eventually send out their own missionaries to foreign missions fields this is the goal opc missions is always trying to put itself out of business so they don't we don't you know typically do anything like uh direct funding of pastors or purchasing buildings this sort of thing but we support uh burgeoning churches local churches into presbyteries into denominations uh helping them along the way in their maturation and one way that we do that is by sending uh qualified instructors to teach on subjects and topics that are beneficial not only to lay people but also to pastors in these countries so i was down there and taught two different conferences on two different weekends the first i was up in the north i should say douglas has contact with reformed christians and established relationships with people in bogota medellin cartagena barranquilla pasto bukhara manga there are people reform people in all of these areas of which he's had contact with and um it's been very encouraging to see these brothers come together and to organize not just as people who appreciate reformed stuff because it's something that's available but people that are self-consciously reformed and confessional subscribing to you know a version of the westminster standards for their language and seeking to develop you know a reformed polity and uh and uh reformed um you know organized denomination in ecumenical fellowship and and hopefully sending people to serve as uh you know ecumenical um correspondence to other denominations so i was down there teaching the first weekend in the north on uh modern roman catholicism and the uh reformation today so we'll cover some of that material here after we get the done with this more introductory stuff and then down in bogota i taught a a series of lessons a conference for the lay people on lamentation tobacco and zephaniah using the material from the bible study book i wrote with crossway both were tremendous uh last year in march i was supposed to go down to bogota but got cancelled due to covid at least my trip got cancelled and i taught remotely through zoom in bogota the material on modern roman catholicism and the reformation so going down there and seeing the people was so much better i loved doing it through zoom i was happy for that opportunity but to be able to communicate with people and spend a week with them it was unparalleled it doesn't even compare so what did you teach when you were down there in bogota jim yeah i was talk teaching on van tills apologetic and um trying to situate van till within his theological commitments was this for pastors i presume uh it it was i think it was i think i forget that if it was a i think it was a pastor's conference it wasn't necessarily for for lay people yeah although there were lay people there but um yeah i think if i recall correctly doug wanted it at a you know more seminary level or whatever so i introduced van till's uh life and then went through some of the basic um theological commitments that he has and how that gives rise to his apologetic method yeah well they're eating it up uh i was talking to one brother uh from pastel who said vantille is one of his favorites and he's just itching for spanish translations of van till which is something we have our eye on doing or helping with at least with with the op so there's a lot of great stuff coming along and this of course fits in with our overall mission of what we're trying to do at reformed forum where we're seeking to support the church and her charge of of uh presenting every person mature in christ and this isn't just for americans or for english speaking peoples so one big way that we do that and have been working on for the last year year and a half is through reformed academy which of course is a section of our website where you can go and sign up for free and take video courses not just watch the videos but it'll track your progress you can take quizzes you could use them in the in the setting of a of an adult sunday school or in a small group study there are all sorts of ways in which people are using i just looked today and we're getting close to 3 500 students now uh and at least 66 countries we might have received our sixth or 67th country or student from our 67th country soon i'll have to check that count a little bit later but we we've been working hard not only to produce courses but to get them translated and uh with the generous support of a lot of our listeners and viewers people that have donated uh we've been able to translate a whole bunch of courses into spanish and uh i was going to uh teach my introduction to covenant theology originally in bogota that was the plan uh i was supposed to go to india but then that trip got cancelled because of the kovid break out or uptick in india so we quickly re-scheduled and went to colombia so then the thought was oh what am i going to teach and i was like well i've got this course on intro to covenant theology so that i sat on that and was preparing to teach for that for about a week and then they finally came back and and said something to the effect of well we don't we don't we want you to teach something else part of the reason was a lot of their people have already taken the course through the internet so um because they they're i can go in and see and we have tons of students in columbia which is tremendous it's encouraging that they've been able to to watch these videos and follow along and learn things so uh you know we're trying to put the pedal to the metal so to speak and produce more courses and get more and more translated into not just latin spanish but also simplified chinese and prioritizing other languages where we have established relationships with indigenous churches in what from our perspective what are foreign mission fields so it's it's working i mean we're not pragmatists but we see the lord's hand at work even just empirically we can look at the numbers and see there's tons of students and so that's been encouraging to me but then also to go and visit and see people to meet people to hug people in person people that have been engaged in using these resources they're not just numbers on the internet but people with names faces with stories with with a vibrant faith in christ that you can connect with it's really is really remarkable i agree it's uh it's humbling to to see the lord move and to and to use us in this way it's encouraging but it's also humbling because it just all the more accents the stewardship that we have at reform forum and it's a big responsibility right because we're not we're not ministering to just a handful of people here in america but we have a ministry uh where we have a responsibility to serve um god's people throughout the world and uh that's a heavy duty responsibility that also comes back to our our vision of the para church and uh you know proper church government and polity which is why we partner with groups like opc foreign missions we're not trying to do the work of the missionary directly as an organization now you and i are both ministers of the gospel we're called to evangelize and to teach is part of our vows to the church which in the context in foreign missions would involve doing you know mission work but we're not trying to establish those relationships or to to partner directly with indigenous churches in foreign fields as reform forums so to speak but for reform forum to enable our faculty and others to serve through the opc and and potentially through several other organizations and ministries that would have these established relationships it's a much i think a much more robust ecumenical view and also one that uh provides for proper church polity and accountability uh and allows reform forum to assist the church rather than replace the church so anyway those are some things that i thought would be useful i don't want this to become you know the inside baseball talk if you'd like for us to talk more about this or perhaps we can have a q a session i could have a you know a live stream or something to let people call in and or and ask their questions and be happy to talk all day all night about these types of things that get me excited but i realize we need to get to some material here so look forward to some future episodes with doug claussen on opc foreign missions and particular strategy and theology of missions and how we engage in those things if you've got some particular questions about colombia uh what's going on down there you can write us a note at mail at reformedforum.org or if you'd be curious on how to help or volunteer or if there are any short-term admissions opportunities send send those emails on over to us and we'll dispatch them to the appropriate place but to get into the material so to speak uh that many of you probably saw in the title and are expecting us to discuss we'll we're going to speak today about the influence of modernism looking at one of my lectures and some of the material in my course on modern roman catholicism and the reformation i'm trying to update our view i think that a lot of reformed people have an outdated view of roman catholicism that's probably from 500 years ago when the reformation occurred but even then sometimes the the average person might even have a caricatured view that is 500 years old so not only is it old and outdated so to speak but it might have been a caricature to begin with so it's helpful to understand uh you know rome's positions and also to understand the different positions within rome and the and the changes that have occurred to the roman catholic church over the last 500 plus years and understand how the reformation and the principles of the reformation apply to those developments you know my goal and my intent and certainly my conclusions at the end of the course are not that there needs to be some rapprochement between rome and the reformation that the reformation is no longer significant or important but rather that the the principles of the reformation especially the five solas and uh are are more significant and more important today than perhaps they even were back in 1517. uh but what's interesting is when we zoom in on the history looking specifically at the early 20th century we start to see uh the changing uh you know tides in culture modernism comes in and that affected not just theology but it affected industry it affected uh you know secular philosophy it affected art and culture in a whole host of ways and it certainly had an effect not only on american presbyterianism as many of us are familiar with with the modernist fundamentalist debates but also had an effect on roman catholicism and uh paralleling those two i think is really interesting and insightful jim do you know about much of this stuff or uh you know typically at least in my experience you know i came to seminary and i didn't come from a liberal arts background i i was a bachelor of science and did a ended up doing a business and computer kind of hybrid degree in college and had to take my gen eds but uh discussing modernism and post-modernism were generally not things that i did in at university what about you at scene anselm yeah um i was a yeah i was a philosophy major uh in college and so um my the curriculum that we had was a very helpful one that laid out a history of philosophy so you took the history of philosophy over the course of four courses i guess as it was and then on top of that you had focused uh studies topically so a class on metaphysics and epistemology or what have you and then and then in addition to that you would have uh specialized classes so you can take classes in thomas aquinas for example was a popular class because at a catholic college the number of the faculty there were specialists and and thomas that was he was the the big one there on campus and so as it were yeah yeah and so um the uh but then i was able to get a really good in addition to that sense of of modern philosophy and that was interesting of course so yeah we were having conversations along those lines and uh modernism is a you know very distinct uh time within western intellectual thought most broadly and uh how that relates though to catholicism is something that i'm mostly ignorant about and that's where we could really learn from you uh the the 19th and 20th centuries uh century developments in roman catholicism is something that you know i i don't have an academic understanding of uh in the sense that i grew up in in 20th century late 20th century roman catholicism gives me an existential kind of insight into modern catholicism but i don't have the academic um the inside stage no but you are uh experientially an expert in how the rosary and our fathers relate to the performance of the mets and the giants yeah yeah no the the harder i prayed the rosary the worse the pets got and so i took that as as being the fact that the mets are the prostate the most powerful apologetic yet yeah well i i've told you my theory right uh that the that that the that the mats are the opc version of new york baseball sports and uh that's that's because we're we're sort of the lovable losers uh we are the ones who are sort of the the second team in the city and uh but but faithful and passionate and uh committed to all the right things yeah well i may dispute about half of what you said right there but i can i can uh i could appreciate some some of that and i just at least need to make note that lovable losers is a trademark of the chicago cubs we should say but at least it ought to be um yeah i'm no expert on modernism in 20th century catholicism but i have done significant amount of reading there and especially in my doctoral work on carl rauner he's right in the mix of it and i'm doing some um some work and research right now on uh nature and grace in 20th century catholicism in advance of our reform forum conference which is coming up at the beginning of october right near you jim and then flugerville texas so if anyone's listening would like to come on over to texas we'd love to see you you can register for that at reformedforum.org conference so we won't get too much into nature and grace we might have an episode on that at some point after i uh nail a few things down in my research but i mean at least as presbyterians we typically speak of modernism and fundamentalism from the perspective of uh of the presbyterian side of things and there's a lot to be said there but there are parallel developments in roman catholicism which i think are quite instructive for us and you know obviously in in the grand scheme of world christian history uh american presbyterianism is a tiny sliver compared to what was going on in rome so you know even though this is more familiar the american presbyterianism is more familiar history to you and to me and to many of our listeners and we hear of the modernist fundamentalist debates or you know controversy we we everyone that's been around for any length of time knows at least the broad sketch of that history well i mean the world doesn't so we want to at least get the perspective right uh it might be more appropriate to say that american presbyterianism the mainline presbyterianism uh paralleled catholicism rather than the other way around but people can get my my points so um modernism really was a development that flowed out of the enlightenment which itself was an 18th century culture movement away from tradition faith and revelation of course and uh after the enlightenment a lot of people started to place a real huge emphasis on human reason so this is some like civ 101 type stuff western civ and this rediscovery of man's natural ability led to a number of different theological positions it had an effect on everything industry culture art i said but it had a huge effect upon theology and we certainly don't have time today to explore all these developments in philosophy and theo in theology but at least i want to take a moment to focus on the significant movement in catholicism and the reformation from pre-modern times through modernism and its battles and then what happened in the 20th century after the church was forced to reckon with these modernistic tendencies so i don't know what would you say jim in terms of your experience with bart regarding modernism because in large measure the american presbyterianism solved quote unquote solved its problem with modernism by turning to bart liberalism is to bart what modernism is to post-modernism and it's a movement of course bartianism is a movement that takes place around the same time as you're sort of moving into more post-modern philosophy and approaches to literature art etc early 20th century and so uh when when you approach when you approach bart it's oftentimes perceived that he is an alternative to modernism and i don't think that that's accurate i think that i don't want to downplay the differences between bart and liberalism classical liberalism at least for sure uh but at the same time uh liberalism in the vein of uh von harnack and uh and then bart's theology are are different variations on the same theme i mean it's the it's it's the same structural program uh at its most basic uh level and so i see bardianism and and liberalism as as siblings within the same family uh bart doesn't solve liberalism he he is liberalism taken to its next logical conclusion um and so you're right when when presbyterianism in this country was looking for sort of like well we don't want to be fundamentalists and we don't really want to be liberals what about bart i mean he's sort of uh well he's a he's neo-orthodox which was the moniker given to him and his ilk back in the day not really an appropriate moniker especially in light of uh today's research but i think that they saw bart as sort of a middle road uh he's he's more orthodox than the liberals but he's not as liberal as they are and certainly he's much more um contemporary and hip and with it um particularly with regard to modern uh theological research than fundamentalism is and we don't want to go that direction either so so princeton seminary uh went almost immediately from reorganizing its board along modernist lines to to the days of uh of of hiring john mackay and and others uh emma bruner came in around in the in the 30s as a as a temporary research professor and etc so um they sort of never really went the the west uh princeton's faculty never went liberal it just it sort of skipped that whole part yeah it went from fundamentalism to bartenism yeah i've been doing uh quite a bit of work on ned stonehouse as well part of my uh responsibilities as opc historian now so i mean i haven't been assigned to do work on stonehouse but it's a project i'm i'm taking up so i've been reading all of stonehouse's contributions to the presbyterian guardian maybe with a view of a project down the road but just doing that and familiarizing myself with the the times and and reading about mckay and you know the movement from j ross stephenson to to mckay um and and the shifts they certainly did go barty and very early they never were full out just classic liberals but uh at the same time they weren't fundamentalists you know modernism uh we got to get some terms here in order for people uh who may not know so uh you know check uh that your podcast either youtube or your podcast has chapter markers i i include chapter markers now in all the episodes of crisis center and you'll see them on youtube as well so if you ever want to skip around you can skip things and jump to different portions of the podcast so getting some terms uh correct you know modernism really rejected the certainty of enlightenment thinking and the existence of an all-powerful creator god in favor of an abstract ethic and the world at the time was in transition and the changes in technology and industry led to large-scale shifts in a secular worldview so this is what's at stake here this is what's going on and these shifts were not only exacerbated by the terrible events of world war one but in theology modernism was a reworking of traditional theological doctrines according to 19th and early 20th century modes of thinking and so at least for our concerns today modernism is really bound up with liberalism they might not be identical but they're bound together and uh whenever we talk about jay gress and machine machine horn uh uh you know i'll give a tip of the hat to presby cast there but whenever we're talking about machine or the founding of the orthodox presbyterian church we use the word liberalism quite a bit and machine's most famous book perhaps was of course christianity and liberalism oddly enough for not oddly enough but the van till's second book on bart was uh christianity and bartenism for the very same reasons but when we hear the word liberalism and liberal even outside the walls of the opc uh we don't always know what we're talking about people often speak of ideas that are liberal when really all they mean is that they are ideas that stray from biblical teaching and in that perspective at least a lot of the catholic church protestantism and even parts of evangelicalism are very liberal but theological liberalism and modernism in the early 20th century was a specific theological movement that had a number of troubling features so there's a more specific technical historical way to speak of classic liberalism that we want to talk about and modernism swayed many people it had a great impact on both the catholic and the protestant churches but to try to fight off that advancing liberal theology there were conservative presbyterians who formulated five uh fundamentals uh that were to be used in addition to the westminster standards is this all sounding familiar to you jim so perhaps some uh some history lessons from seminary and uh your licensure exams or at least your ordination exams yeah i i did do so great on those so yeah anyway yeah it's starting to come back to me now i've learned i've learned more after seminary than i did before it yeah well i mean the thumbnail sketch is that there were people who were modernists who said that they subscribed to the westminster standards but in effect they didn't they didn't subscribe x animal from the heart or they subscribed to them as valid theories but not exclusive theories uh you know they had all sorts of other ways to you know subscribe to the standards without actually believing them the way that you know conservatives thought everyone was supposed to believe them and so people uh formulated five fundamentals uh they were the inspiration of the bible and the inerrancy of scripture as a result of that there's the virgin birth of christ there's the belief that christ's death was an atonement for sin the bodily resurrection of christ kind of important and then there's also the historical reality of christ's miracles so people were you know opposed to these somewhat that and and some people thought that you shouldn't add to the confession because the confession says what it needs to say other people thought it wasn't these weren't specific enough other people the auburn affirmationists agreed with these five fundamentals but didn't think they should be exclusive they said no we we believe these we agree with these but we think the church should be broad enough for people who have other theories you know of the atonement for example or maybe don't believe that christ was born of a virgin etc but you know of course our listeners here i hope uh will agree that each of these points of doctrine are at least extremely important and significant and if we reject any of them it would necessarily mean disastrous effects for sound theology and in presbyterian history the greatest example of the fight against modernism came to a head in 1929 and that year the board at princeton seminary as you already indicated jim decided to reorganize in such a way that the majority of people on the board were then modernists or at least sympathetic to modernism and the opponents of modernism at the time were called fundamentalists because they would agree with these five fundamentals or the series of fundamentals that was written in a publication at the time and along with their de facto leader jay grissom machine they broke off from the seminary to found westminster theological seminary in philadelphia where you and i of course both graduated would it be helpful for us to to put it this way if we were to describe liberalism in a nutshell the way the way that you were defining it that it's a in the area of of religion okay or yeah just most broadly religion uh liberalism or modernism in in the sphere of religion uh basically carries with this idea of a broadening right sort of a a and a an a an occlusive inclusivism right where um where there is a a a broadening of both mind of doctrine of inclusion within the church subscription vows approaches to the standards etc that allow more underneath the umbrella would that be a fair way to summarize it i think that's an effect i don't know if that's uh you know modernism you know that's that would be the actual definition that we might want to use but that's certainly what happened my point is there might be other movements that have similar effects that weren't exactly modernistic but i think the modernism that was affecting the culture and uh eschewing traditional notions about god in favor of you know reinterpreting the bible according to ethics for example rather than history it's not a supernatural you know god acting with supernatural effects in time and space but rather the bible being a record of human experience you know of the divine rather than a record of god's interaction with humanity um that's more or less you know the type of modernism that i see at work people wanting to make room for that whether they agreed with it entirely or not uh people in the modernistic constellation were certainly uh making room for people to hold those views it was very common like we're reading these these things uh the presbyterian church in the usa the mainline church at the time uh you know the stone house has some wonderful articles not only they addressed modernism in the board of foreign missions but stonehouse goes and starts to critique modernism in the the board of christian education and starts to they start to review the books that they recommend highly recommend like for candidates in the ministry and even for like high schoolers and this sort of thing these are just full-blown modernist books like people you know just completely like wouldn't even potentially not even agree to the resurrection of christ bodily like and these are not not just allowed but they were recommended by the christian the board of christian education of the denomination so we need to get our minds around this like this is what presbyterianism was in the early 20th century it was wild yeah and unbelieving large portions of it just unbelieving it's nuts not just kind of pushing the edges of of culture and whatnot but uh you know th this is what we're dealing with back you know 100 years ago it's unbelievable you know theological wild west it was and uh you know fast forwarding several years in 1936 um uh machine and others for various reasons we can get into another time uh founded uh the presbyterian church of america which eventually came to be known as the the orthodox presbyterian church in 1938 i believe founded in 36 changed its name because it got sued by the main line and they didn't have enough money to to uh to fight it um eventually uh created another church and uh we ended up with the fundamentalists so to speak um and all those people that were opposed to modernism and liberalism um breaking off and it was a small movement there were a lot of relative conservatives people soft middle people who stayed in the main line uh but a handful broke off and formed the opc but uh for people like you and me that's kind of where we end our history we tend to think of that being you know the sum total of modernism's effect upon the church uh but there's a huge history of modernism and roman catholicism of which i was completely unaware until i started looking more into uh into uh coral runner and other things you know um there were several theologians uh who started to write pieces and to teach modernist theology within the roman catholic church and that prompted a response from the pope people may be surprised to know that pope pius xi instituted an anti-modernist oath in 1910. so just parallel that with what's going on in presbyterianism in 1910 the pope issued an anti-modernist oath and he ordered that all clergy pastors confessors preachers religious superiors and professors in philosophical theological seminaries subscribe to this oath in effect denouncing modernism saying that they're not modernists and denouncing it and by doing that he really institutionalized an anti-modernist position and since catholic theologians then could not be modernists our our conclusion might be oh well then they must have been fundamentalists no that is not how it works now in catholicism they were forbidden by the pope in effect of being a modernist but that doesn't mean that they became fundamentalists or you know theological conservatives um certainly not um we want to think of modernism and liberalism as specific theological movements during this time period but even though the catholic church was officially against modernism they did not move closer toward protestant fundamentalists so what happened well that's where we get into the interesting history uh before pius the tenth issued the anti-modernist oath pope leo xiii established the philosophy of thomas aquinas as the official position of the roman catholic church that was in 1879 and consequently then for several decades it was practically impossible to find a catholic theologian in good standing who would not call himself atomist because they had to be thomas because that was the official philosophy of the church but there were many may we say creative catholic theologians who officially have to be thomas but yet they might reinterpret traditional catholic teaching in light of various other philosophies and there were theologians such as joseph carl rauner and bernard lonergan who ended up reinterpreting thomas aquinas in light of philosophers such as emmanuel kant and that new philosophy this hybrid could still exist under the brand name of tomism but in effect it's really no tomism at all it's kind of this i don't know frankenstein but it's a hybrid a transcendental atomism that refashioned aquinas without at least on the surface transgressing leo the 13th declaration of 1879 or pius the 10th anti-modernist oath jim this is kind of what i end up calling the both and phenomena in catholicism very rarely do you see either or sometimes you see those anathemas like at trent but generally it's not either or it's both and it's always okay we find two things that are contradictory but rather than eliminating one part or half of the church who may agree with one portion they they tend to find a way to keep everything under the umbrella and theologians who may be forced into a certain type of position tend to find a creative way to maintain the position they would like under the at least superficial banner of whatever is official yeah um i think it's it's the it's the con aristotle synthesis right in some ways you know i wonder i mean this is a question i have because as as you're thinking i mean when when you sort of uh source comte as a roman catholic i would think that there would be some catholics of a more conservative stripe who would look at that and and say i don't know how much of that would be hey that's modern thinking and modern thinking's not good or is it protestant thinking and protestant thinking's not good because kant's sort of the the protestant um thomas right i mean he's the philosopher theologian of of the of lutheranism uh in in the modern period and so i wonder how many catholics would see people who were compromised you know trying to re-hash thomas in in kant categories as being a compromise with protestantism yeah well i have spoken with some very well you know accomplished catholic scholars who are conservative uh and despise uh have great disdain for the theology of rauner and other people like that and just don't find it not only they find it unbiblical but even you know out of step with catholic traditional thought and theology but this is this is the issue with catholicism with last i checked i don't know what it's like in the last several years but at one point you know officially on the rolls were about 1.2 billion catholics and okay put put 1.2 billion people in the room you're gonna find a breadth of views if you if you think that evangelicalism is a useless term because it's too broad and diverse oh just just wait till you uh you know lift the rock up and look at what's underneath roman catholicism it's even more so i'm i mean i'd be happy to engage with catholic scholars but i've been struggling over the last couple years to see you know at the end of the day what makes a catholic a catholic and and it's hard for me to get around the just the baseline bottom core commitment being fellowship with the bishop of rome i don't i don't i i think that is the fundamental core belief or commitment maybe i'm wrong i'd love to hear otherwise but that's that is the cinequanon of a roman catholic and there you know i guess there's um and everything else is a free-for-all i mean really quite frankly right there are things that are out of bounds i mean the the pope and others people have been censored people have been excommunicated i'm not saying that doesn't happen but you're right i mean it's it it it is largely a free-for-all and people protestants who you know swim the tiber and want to go back to rome uh or go to rome uh they they have this vision that rome is some unified monolith that has this rich history and has been standing firm in their same beliefs for ages and ages that's just not true yeah the um even as a as a roman catholic growing up i witnessed liturgically things across the spectrum you've got very traditional staid worship masses um they don't worship services um very staid masses that are very traditional very liturgical very formal stuffy even and then you have others that are on the opposite side of that charismatic i mean quite i mean there is a charismatic movement within catholicism as well uh so i i just i just find it interesting i i can't help but to think that that protest and i don't know why but but protestantism in the most broad sense of the word has not gone completely without its influence upon modern roman catholicism whether it's theologically culturally liturgically what have you there's crosstalk yeah yeah there's there's so much of that of course as as much of a hodgepodge as modern catholicism is uh similarly you find within protestantism as well uh just a um really a hodgepodge we in the opc are are pretty tight but what are we 30 000 compared to 1.2 billion uh you know we're just a insignificant drop in the bucket in earthly sense of the word i know i know there's probably been more more mets players in history than opc members yeah i don't know how many that they've had since 1962. there's probably been more mets on the on the dl than that yeah well this year this year there's been more more mets on the il uh to be politically correct um then i forget that there have been schools what's that i'm old school over here disabled so anyway what happened then how did catholicism deal with this and this is where we get more interesting to compare catholicism and and uh mainline protestantism specifically presbyterianism but the catholic church of course if you know much about church history at all underwent significant changes in the 1960s i mean the united states did but catholicism did globally in 1962 pope john the 23rd brought many catholic officials and theologians together to rethink catholic doctrine on a whole host of issues and they underwent a project of ajournamento which is an italian word that means updating and so it has been said that they wanted to open the windows of the church to let fresh air in and under the leadership of john the 23rd and later then paul the sixth uh the second vatican council met from 1962 to 1965 to work out that uh updating plan and vatican ii as a ecumenical council of which we weren't invited but medical council set out an aggressive agenda to update the church the roman catholic church for a contemporary setting and i think it was successful in that regard at least it changed quite a bit in its wake uh the anti-modernist oath was dropped in 1967 that's huge so they got rid of it and the tenor of the magisterium or the at least the tenor of the the officials i should say quickly changed and during the council the once uh nascent transcendental theology figures like lonergan rahner marshall and others it started to grow firm roots and become much more established and figures like ronner who were looked upon with suspicion by uh the church earlier even just prior to the council's commencement now became its foremost authorities uh ronner was uh on the censored list before the council and then at the council he was invited to come as an expert and became what one person said uh the holy ghost writer of vatican ii is his influence his mysterious influences was upon all the constitutions and uh all of the resolutions and really what happened is uh post vatican ii to many the roman catholic church had been turned upside down uh historical theologians were left and still are left to sort out the relationship between the rome of yesterday and its uh instantiation in this latter half of the 20th century the council if you don't know produced several documents and dogmatic constitutions they presented new theological constructions that significantly changed the catholic church's official views on a number of issues some of these covering the doctrine of revelation the liturgy that's one a lot of old-timers will remember because then you could have the the liturgy the mass could be said in the vernacular not just in latin it was a huge change uh they updated rome's relation to other christian bodies and uh even to world religions and to summarize a lot of these these movements in just a few sentences we might say that there was a general inclusive or ecumenical movement because after vatican ii the catholic church recognized grace in other religions and even in the world in general and so there was now a road that may uh was made for reunion with the eastern church but potentially even with protestants and even people of other faiths that could be included under one massive catholic umbrella the theological equipment was installed so to speak to make this possible and these are all important questions that you know remain to be answered for the roman catholic church and people in roman catholicism or hashing these things out still and uh you know we can explore a lot of these things down the road but um to kind of look at these sweeping changes from our our modernist fundamentalist perspective in one sense you know the creativity of progressive catholic theologians has made the catholic theological umbrella so broad that it's virtually non-distinct and those are just several reasons why many people think that the catholic church post-vatican 2 is incredibly different from the catholic church that luther and calvin knew but that certainly does not make it any closer to reformation theology so we can look and see modernism and you have an anti-moderate you have the official indoctrination or or the uh installment of thomas aquinas's philosophy as the official philosophy of the roman catholic church in 1879 the anti-modernist oath established in 1910 but then all sorts of social and theological forces pressing upon the church forcing it to update its views leading to vatican ii and all of the dogmatic constitutions and documents coming out of vatican ii which in many ways completely change the catholic church's position to the world what happened in mainline protestantism and this is what i think it's really interesting because in short protestantism in general did not fare much better and had similar effects similar changes and though its significance in terms of peer members is rapidly decreasing the mainline churches such as the evangelical lutheran church in america elka or the united methodist church soon to split in half and the presbyterian church usa remains some of the largest protestant bodies but mainline protestantism suffered the effects of these doctrines as well they struggled with the same basic issues as rome especially with the doctrine of scripture and the the pc usa in particular reacted against the modernism that plagued princeton seminary and many other large christian bodies in the early 20th century but instead of following machin and they've battled against majin and they were fighting against modernism so to speak or trying to not get swallowed up by liberalism and modernism but instead of following machin in his fight against modernism they moved in a decidedly direction so they didn't follow the modernists but neither did they follow majon so to speak they followed bart the enemy of my enemy is my friend and in 1967 remember vatican 2 is 1962 to 1965 which largely could be seen as uh the church trying to reckon with the fallout of modernism on its on its members in 1967 the presbyterian church in the usa adopted an updated confession that many people recognize as a capitulation to the theology of carl bart and in that view the incarnation is eternal and the scriptures are not the word of god in themselves so to speak i'll let you speak about that jim but van till has a whole book on this a smaller book but a book on the confession of 67 and i think his conclusions are sound this is not an improvement many people thought it was shoring up the church's confession in the face of modernism and that things were better off but uh in other ways they sold the farm and a large measure became bardian as a result and in some respects yeah i mean the the confession of 67 is just one of many other confessional documents that the pc usa puts in sort of a museum box of confessions that you can sort of yeah they collect that yeah yeah collect them and you know these are historical documents that describe somebody's belief back then yeah it's it's like going into the princeton seminary library right and you got you got all these portraits and you've got uh hodges cane or you know whatever uh that he got from hawaii somewhere i don't know um but anyway the uh the the whole the whole thing about the book of confessions is that it really is a it really is a display box of just you know confessions that have sort of tangently fallen uh within to one degree or another the reformed and presbyterian tradition uh you don't have to subscribe them you don't have to believe them you can interpret them any way you want they have no teeth they there's no you know it's just a collection so the confession of 1967 gets thrown into the lot as sort of just a another reformed confession that for your information fyi only and you can read the 1967 you could agree with the disagree that it doesn't really matter and i would say that the pc usa has as many non-guardians in her course as as they do guardians if i don't know what the percentage would be and how they figure that stuff out but you have within the pc usa even within westminster with i keep saying that even within princeton seminary itself you have among faculty members a number of very spirited debates about bart and his theology you know pro or con or how do we interpret it etc so the pc usa is as all over the map as as any others um the i had heard this uh camden i don't know if this is true or not but but there was i i've heard that there was hope in the 1960s when the when the confession of 67 was coming down the the pike and part of the reason why van till wrote his book on the confession of 1967 was in the hopes that that there would be a a a a sudden influx yeah within the opc of of refugees from the pc usa where guys in the opc can you know point to the 67c see look that's we told you this is where this is going and now finally they've denied scripture and you know etcetera etcetera and it just didn't happen uh the the the the windfall just never arrived in the opc of refugees from you see usa on that so i i don't have the documentation for that but i've been taught that i've heard that myself so i don't know if that's true i can't prove to or point to sources at this precise moment so i don't want to over play my hand of no cards or at least vague memories but i have vague memories uh as well so this might be the case where you speculated something someday then i heard you speculate it and now you're bringing this up and i'm reinforcing your original speculation or vice versa so we might be reinforcing each other we're an echo chamber of two but that's certainly been on my mind and uh i think there was an intent in why van till wrote what he did otherwise why why bother why care there were there were still many conservatives um in the pc usa in 1967 and uh you know there there would have been thought perhaps that that some would have come back by then they had merged with the united presbyterian church and had become the upc usa that was the church into which i was born uh and existed for three years until that church once again merged with the pcus to form the present-day pc usa so i i don't that's certainly plausible i i think it's more than plausible it seems to be to make lots of sense but i don't have the documentation for it but just as i mentioned or at least uh speculated that what is the cinequon on of a roman catholic it seems to be official visible fellowship with the bishop of rome you know in many ways there's kind of like what is it that makes a a mainline presbyterian a mainline presbyterian at the end of the day sometimes it's evangelicalism or big tentism wins out over confessional identity and it's just a different ethos a different mentality where as long as the church body i'm in doesn't tell me i can't believe as a conservative so as long as i'm allowed to have my conservative beliefs in this larger body even if i'm fellowshipping with you know modernists who deny the bodily resurrection of christ they'll put up with it if it means that they're part of a larger church a larger visible church a larger platform with potentially greater evangel evangelistic witness cultural influence all of these things and i really do think that this is something that needs to be developed i don't know who it is to do it um you know but but these are some of the themes that charlie dennison uh wrote about and which had been collected in in the uh his collection of essays in history for a pilgrim people edited by danny olinger and david thompson i hope to get that reprinted uh sometime soon but the opc doesn't have that have that genetic constitution you don't have that makeup no certainly some people you know might tend toward that way uh or they're in the opc for other reasons maybe it's just the conservative church that's near them but whatever but at least in terms of the denominational identity and historic identity you know from leading up to 36 and then beyond it's a it's a pilgrim people it's a pilgrim church that is much more concerned with confessional fidelity even at the expense of cultural influence and evangelistic witness by numbers alone we will gladly throw those things to the side if it means that we get to retain our confessional fidelity you know that it's just a different makeup now maybe i'm maybe i'm whitewashing things but what do you think about this to me it seems why wouldn't here's the to get back to your original question why didn't the church receive an influx of ministers ministerial members and churches post 1967 my my thesis my hypothesis here is that even though they might have been sympathetic confessionally they have a different more basic commitment to the larger more influential visible church that's i think that i think that's why i don't know what do you think of that hypothesis yeah i mean i i don't know i can either confirm or deny that hypothesis in part because i just don't have the the research or the expertise to substantiate that but i will say this that that mindset okay is is boy i got to be careful here that mindset is maybe a relation of some sort maybe a a kissing cousin of of the very modernism of which they protest against which they protest because sure if you think about it right you know and i i've i've sort of made this argument before uh you know on the spirit of schleiermacher right as as you think about and this is why i asked you that question before about the broadening idea i mean when when you when you go back to schleiermacher right what's going on there why is he the father of liberalism the reason why he's the father of liberalism is because he wants to recast doctrine in a similar way in which kant would recast christian doctrine uh he wants to recast christian doctrine in such a way that it becomes plausible to a modern world right he wants to answer christianity's culture despisers right the ones who are saying oh that's an old time religion that is that has no bearing on modern life whatsoever and schleiermacher kind of in a moment of growing nervous that maybe christianity is losing its its dominance and grip on western civilization and culture um says oh wait wait wait wait wait wait we're going to recast a christian doctrine to make it acceptable to you and to more people uh to to make it more palatable to a modern world for the sake of saving our churches so that we can maintain that you know larger presence in the culture presence platform whatever within the culture and so when you come to liberalism in matron's day part of the driving force to all this is not sort of just philosophical pre-commitments or brainwashed by modern society or something like that yeah i mean there's a there there's a there's a desire for the church to remain i mean there's always been a competitiveness within protestant churches here in america anyway right i mean everybody you know going back to the time of the frontiers and you know the presbyterians and the baptists and the methodists are all vying for the numbers and everybody's obsessed with whose church is bigger and um and so is there a fantasy league for this there should be right like a draft draftkings or espn mainline churches i'm going to draft a church and see see how many members he gets how many times it's mentioned in the paper and on cable news see how many points you get at the end of every week you get 10 points for a tucker carlson a mention you get if you if you could read your name in the newspaper the next day right yeah especially the wall street journal 100 points if a celebrity joins your church yeah right right yeah you get that's right yeah that'd be great uh but anyway yes so there's this there's this whole thing going on of wanting to broaden the church why you want to you want to keep the numbers so that you maintain your platform right and that's that's not just a mentality of liberal theology right but that's also very much the mentality of the more squishy middle evangelical um kind of approach as well so so again i can't substantiate your claim with hard cold facts but might i can't either one similarly that's so i said it's a hypothesis this is just a research question in my notes uh this is what i would tag you know hashtag research questions so i could search back and see it's just a thought you know yeah if anyone has some ideas on that write in and and uh we'll follow up and see if we can if we can either you know substantiate or disqualify this hypothesis yeah see if i could just say this i mean when when you when you think about this right the spirit of schleiermacher haunts not just the halls of the pc usa or princeton seminary right but it's it's haunting our own very halls right whether we're talking about you know i'm speaking here more generally of the church in america and seminaries in america i mean it's the spirit that needs to be constantly exercised uh within our uh within our our ranks because it's in our heart the spirit of schleiermacher haunts our hearts we want that that prominence that pride that that big church that that broad church that can have numbers about which we can boast and all of that so anyway that's just um my final well this is another thing you know another question or thread i'd like to follow up regarding my stone house reading because stone house where i currently am in 1937 part of my brain is living in 1937 right now he's interacting you know the world council interacting with and responding to movements such as these broad church union movements like with the world council of churches and others and and there's this confusion uh or this equation of visible church unity with ecumenicity and with effectiveness or even with biblical fidelity it's the presumption that you know at the bare minimum we have to be governmentally related in order to obey the lord according to you know unity and and uh truth but this i think is a false dichotomy uh you know the lord says sanctify them in truth thy word is truth there's always a presupposition that church unity is also is also predicated upon truth doctrine correct belief you know and uh you can't compromise that just for visible unity um and as important as the visible church is the visible church is not the be-all end-all it's visible to church includes goats sorry uh but and that's just going to be the case until the lord returns and purifies his church entirely so that's a an episode for another day i'd love to do one on a reformed a thorough robust reformed doctrine of ecumenicity what does that look like and how does it work that's uh that's one for another day but we've gone on uh plenty long i think i hope that you've enjoyed some or most of this discussion if you have any questions comments or feedback want to follow up perhaps the best way to do that is by emailing us at mail reformedforum.org but we're also available on twitter at reformedforum or jim's at jjcassidy and i'm at camdenbucy when checking on that if you got a comment uh or remark and and stay tuned uh to the email subscription list we just announced was now selling usb thumb drives that have a pre-packaged course on them lanes course on foundations of covenant theologies available and you can get the companion books in a bulk pack of ten all a great deal so if you're not subscribed to the email you did not get that news in your inbox subscribe now and you'll get news about forthcoming books there are a couple coming very soon and jim's course on the westminster shore of catechism coming up it's a next on deck in the editing bay so we'll get to that soon just after lane's course on even with christ is translated and released should be in the next week or two but anyway thanks so much for listening we hope you join us again next time on christ the center [Music]

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Published: Thu Sep 09 2021