Bleating Wolves: Evangelicals and Catholics Together

The Trinity Foundation has posted a series of lectures in audio format on the topic of Roman Catholicism and the doctrine of justification. (Scroll down to Collection 3: The Gospel and Its Critics: Conference on Christianity and Roman Catholicism (9 lectures). The first lecture, Bleating Wolves: Evangelicals and Catholics Together, is particularly relevant to reforming Anglicans who protest the false union between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelical Anglicans in the new Anglican Church in North America.

In this lecture, the late Mr. John Robbins, explains that many Evangelicals today have compromised essential doctrines of the Bible for the sake of ecumenical unity with Roman Catholics. Many Evangelicals have signed the Evangelicals and Catholics Together document, which sells out the scriptural doctrine of justification by faith alone to a doctrine of works righteousness. (See the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals response to ECT, The Cambridge Declaration).

But this has implications as well for Anglicans who are trying to reform the Anglican communion. Most Anglicans think that Anglo-Catholics are "evangelical" simply because they claim to believe in the authority of Scripture and to believe in proselytizing with their false gospel of works. This cuts to the very heart of the issue for the formation of a new province, the Anglican Church of North America, which is essentially an Anglo-Catholic denomination which "tolerates" Evangelicals who are willing to sacrifice justification by faith alone; the doctrine of sola scriptura, that is, that Holy Scripture and not "tradition" or the "church" or "apostolic succession" is the final authority in all matters of faith and doctrine; the doctrine of salvation by grace and grace alone apart from any efforts or merits of man. I could go on but the bottom-line here is that Gerald Bray, James I. Packer, and many other so-called Evangelical Anglicans have bowed to the idols of the papists and the romanists by making justification by faith alone a "secondary" doctrine which is in the "fine print" of the Gospel and is not the very Gospel itself.

Robbins argues that even the principle of "co-belligerency" is wrong. Thus, we cannot be in league with enemies of the Gospel--even Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics--simply to fight a political or cultural war against political liberalism.

It is extremely disturbing that the self-proclaimed successor to Billy Graham, Rick Warren, has given his full endorsement to the Anglo-Catholic province recently established in North America. One by one we are seeing before our eyes a mass apostasy of evangelicalism into theological relativism masquerading as co-belligerency, "evangelical fellowship", and cooperation against a common enemy in the cultural war. While the cultural war is a concern, in waging that war Christians and Evangelicals should not jettison the Gospel essentials which are at the foundation of the existence of the visible and local congregations in the first place.

In light of this I might have to rethink my position that we can be "co-belligerents" with Roman Catholics and Mormons, etc., on moral issues in the public arena. This is certainly a thought provoking lecture. You may listen by clicking on this title: Bleating Wolves: Evangelicals and Catholics Together.