Lux Lucet

One aspect of Marshall’s writing that immediately jumps out to this author is his respect for logic.  People in 1927 weren’t as irrational as they are in 2020.   In the first paragraph, Marshall quotes Pope Leo XIII – Leo XIII was a notably influential pope whose most famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum, is the cornerstone Rome’s Social Doctrine, the Church’s anti-American, anti-liberty, socialist program of economics and politics – saying, “The Almighty has appointed the charge of the human race, between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human things.”  From this, Marshall quite rightly concludes, “The result is that that Church, if true to her basic political doctrine, is hopelessly committed to that intolerance that has disfigured so much of her history.” 

But what Marshall saw so clearly in 1927 has become completely invisible to most American Protestants in 2020.  In the quote at the top of this post, John Robbins is quoted as saying that, “The alliance between neo-evangelicals and Romanists in the Culture Wars will…result in the election of our second Romanist president.”  Robbins wrote this in 1998, and here is 2020 we find ourselves at the cusp of a possibly electing a second Roman Catholic president in the person of Joe Biden. 

But unlike Protestants in 1927, today’s neo-evangelicals have no problem at all supporting a Roman Catholic presidential candidate. 

Given Christianity Today’s longstanding treason on the Catholic issue, it should come as no surprise that the stories appearing the magazine never ask any of the tough questions that Charles Marshall did in his 1927 open letter.  As odd as this may sound, The Atlantic of 1927 was a more Christian publication than Christianity Today (CT) is in 2020. 

To give you the flavor of  CT’s coverage of Joe Biden, let’s look at a few quotes from an article published in August of this year titled “Joe Biden Campaigns on Faith.”     Now Protestants may reasonably expect a publication that claims to be the voice of America’s conservative Evangelicals to use “faith” in its Biblical sense, but instead the magazine equivocates on the word.  Faith in the Christian sense is the understanding of, and assent (agreement) to, the propositions (doctrines) taught in the 66 books of the Bible.  There is another Christian sense of the term “faith” which is simply a shorthand for Christianity, the doctrines taught in Scripture which alone is the Word of God.  But CT does not use “faith” in either one of these senses.

What CT does do is use the term “faith” to refer to Joe Biden’s Catholic faith.  In his book Faith and Saving Faith, Gordon Clark noted that saving faith – the understanding of, and belief in, the doctrine of Justification by Belief Alone – is a subset of the more general term faith.  In Clark’s usage, one can have faith in any number of ideas.  So long as one understands what is being proposed and accepts it as true, one can be said to have faith.  But not all faith is saving faith.  Saving faith is believing the Word of God.  For this reason, it is not necessarily wrong for CT to speak of Biden’s Catholic faith, but set in the article’s larger context, it represents an abuse of the term.  It is an abuse of the term in that, as one gathers from reading the whole article, CT conflates Roman Catholic faith with Christian faith, leaving readers to conclude that, if not exactly alike, Romanism and Protestantism are both valid expressions of Christianity. 

CT tips its ecumenical hand by quoting Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary, on his views of Biden’s Catholicism. 

“He is viewed as having an authentic faith,” said Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary and professor of faith and public life. “He may not be the conservative Catholic that a lot of evangelicals would like him to be, but when he talks about his faith, it rings true.”

Mouw was one of the signers of the historic ecumenical document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” along with evangelical leaders Chuck Colson, J.I. Packer, and Bill Bright. According to Mouw, the 1994 statement was partly the result of high-level theological discussions about doctrines such as justification by faith, partly the result of political alliances over issues such as abortion, and partly the result of lay evangelicals responding to the heartfelt faith of their Catholic neighbors and co-workers.

Evangelicals might have a similar response to Biden’s religious commitments, Mouw said.

“Most evangelicals didn’t care about the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue on justification. They said I know a Catholic at work and he loves the Lord,” he explained. “People believe Biden’s faith is real. He has a pastoral tone. … A lot of evangelicals who support Trump do worry about his mean-spiritedness and the polarization and we’ve been missing that pastoral tone.”

In Mouw’s statement we see in microcosm what is the central problem with the American Protestant church in 2020: the failure to understand, proclaim and defend the doctrine of Justification by Belief Alone against all its opponents, including the false gospel of the Antichrist pope and Babylonian Harlot Roman Catholic Church-State.  While Biden’s faith may be real, in the sense that he truly believes the things he claims to believe, this does not make him a Christian.  Many sincere people will end up in hell, not because they did not genuinely believe what they claimed to believe, but because what they believed was a lie.  Rome’s gospel of salvation by faith and works is one such lie, one that leads to eternal death for all who hold it.

We see also in neo-evangelical Richard Mouw’s comments a partial fulfillment of what John Robbins predicted in 1998: “The alliance between neo-evangelicals and Romanists in the Culture Wars will…result in the election of our second Romanist president.”  That Mouw himself has been neck-deep in the neo-evangelical/Roman Catholic ecumenical movement is clear from the CT article which notes, “Mouw was one of the signers of the historic ecumenical document ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”  Now there are any number of words that come to mind when this author considers “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT) but “historic” is not one of them.  Treasonous to Jesus Christ and to his Gospel for starters.  Blasphemous, foolish, an enormous betrayal of the truth, lies, these are other fitting descriptions. 

Unsurprisingly, Mouw told CT that he plans on voting for Biden, “despite some qualms about the Democratic Party’s positions on abortion and religious liberty.”  In this, he shows himself in possession of less judgment than many Roman Catholics, who recognize the moral monstrosity of abortion and plan to vote for the pro-life Donald Trump.  Interestingly, the CT article doesn’t mention that Mouw has any qualms about the ongoing, open racial violence and anarchy inflicted on the nation by Black Lives Matter and Antifa that Biden, his running mate Kamala Harris and the Democrats in general have approved of.   

Despite its ecumenical flavor, the CT article does acknowledge differences between Romanists and Evangelicals.  But even here, the ecumenism of CT and the Protestant church in 2020 is evident.  We read,

In 1928, [Al] Smith said he didn’t believe Catholic teaching (at the time) that pluralism and democracy were inherently anti-Christian. He accepted the American set up that separates church and state—and thought it was a good thing. Many conservative Protestants, looking at authoritarian Catholic regimes in Europe, didn’t believe him. Biden, in some ways, faces the opposite problem. He disagrees with church teaching on some issues and evangelicals do believe him.

In 1928, American Christians doubted Al Smith when he said he disbelieved the RCS’s teaching that the U.S. Constitution and Roman Catholicism were incompatible.  In 2020, CT claims that it is Biden’s rejection of Rome’s teaching on, for example, abortion that Evangelicals find off putting.  “If only Biden believed what the Church teaches,” say contemporary Evangelicals.  It is astounding to this author just how far the downgrade in American Protestant theology has advanced in the past ninety-two years.    

Roman Catholicism v. Liberty

In his 1999 book Ecclesiastical Megalomania, John Robbins observed,

It might be expected that an institution such as the Roman Church-State, ruled by an absolute emperor, structured in a rigid hierarchy, supranational in scope, aristocratic in character, and none of whose officials is elected – an institution that in more than one way is an anachronism, and intrusion of the ancient world into the modern – would not favor constitutional capitalism.  But how deep-seated its hostility to freedom and free enterprise is was a surprise even to this author.  The popes have expressed their hatred, not only for Protestantism (a hatred perhaps muted recently, not by a change of mind, but by the relativism of the Church-State influenced by a postmodern culture), but also for the political and economic expression of Christianity:  capitalism.  In the pages that follow, the reader will find scores of such statements from the Magisterium of the Roman Church-State.  They are part of a system of thought that is one of the most impressive systems yet devised by men.  They are not disjointed statements, but the logical conclusions of premises accepted in Roman theology.  They are offered to the world by the Roman Magisterium as part of a package deal, and we are not at liberty, as some American Catholics would prefer to do, to accept the Church-State’s theology and reject its economic and political philosophy.  That flies in the face, not only of the claims of the Church-State itself, but of reason as well (24, emphasis added).

Robbins’ book is a tour de force demolition of the RCS’s Social Doctrine and is a must read for any Christian who wants to understand what Rome really teaches about economics and politics.  And what Rome teaches is at odds with the U.S. Constitution and the American system of free enterprise.  As Robbins notes, “And if there be any Roman Catholic readers who are inclined to favor freedom and free enterprise, may they understand that their Church does not, and therefore they must choose to be either good Catholics, or good Christians. 

In his response to Charles Marshall’s open letter, Al Smith wrote in the May 1927 issue of The Atlantic that there was no such conflict as Marshall supposed existed between Roman Catholicism and the Constitution.  This is an incredible statement given the enormous gulf between the economic and political thought of Rome, which is fascist in nature, and the American system of constitutional capitalism. 

One can see this conflict very easily in the area of private property.  The historic, if not present, American position on private property is that, “individuals and groups are free to own property and to dispose of it as they see fit” (Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 49).  On the other hand, Rome makes a distinction between ownership and use.  An owner may retain title to his property, but the government has the right to regulate the use of that property “for public use and the common good” (Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 57-58).

Smith attempts to defuse Marshall’s accusation that Rome “regard dogmatic intolerance, not alone as her incontestable right, but as her sacred duty,” by arguing that this statement, found in the Catholic Encyclopedia, applies only to Catholics who are required to accept the Church’s dogma.  But this is hardly reassuring, for it is Rome that offers to the world its teaching as part of a package deal.  Romanists are not free, as Smith argues, to accept the Church’s theological teaching while ignoring its economics and politics, for the fascist economic and political thought of Rome proceeds from its theology in the same way that the economics and politics of Christianity – constitutional capitalism – proceed from the teachings of Scripture.  One cannot, without pain of contradiction, accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ and be a socialist.  Likewise, one cannot be a good Roman Catholic and believe in economic and political liberty.  This is not to say that it is impossible for a Romanist to inconsistently accept the economics and politics of the Reformation while rejecting its theology, but logically those positions do not go together. 

In a Chapter 18 of Ecclesiastical Megalomania titled “Strategy for Subverting a Republic,” Robbins wrote,

Realizing that, for the time being, the Church-State would have to tolerate democratic governments, Leo XIII and his successors appealed to Roman Catholic laymen to advance the cause of the Church-State.  For example, Leo XIII wrote:

First and foremost it is the duty of all Catholics worthy of the name and wishful to be known as most loving children of the Church, to reject without swerving whatever is inconsistent with so fair a title; to make use of popular institutions, so far as can honestly be done, for the advancement of truth and righteousness; to strive that liberty of action shall not transgress the bounds marked out by nature and the law of God; to endeavor to bring back all civil society to the pattern and form of Christianity which we have described…

These laymen, of course, are known as the ‘pope’s divisions.’ To the extent that they obey the pope, rather than think for themselves or be guided by Scripture, they constitute a fifth column in every nation on Earth. They are the means by which the papacy has advanced its agenda in the United States for 200 years (185-186).

It is absurd for Romanists to argue that, on the one hand, that the pope is “the father of kings, the governor of the world and the Vicar of Christ” and, on the other hand, to claim, as does Al Smith in his response to Marshall that, “these encyclicals are not articles of our faith.”  If the pope really were the father of kings, governor of the world and Vicar or Christ, the only logical response when he tells you to jump is to ask, “How high your holiness?” 

Closing Thoughts

Despite the assurances of Al Smith, CT magazine and even Donald Trump, American Protestants ought to be wary about supporting Roman Catholic candidates for office, especially presidential candidates. 

As Jesus said, no man can serve two masters.  Contrary to Al Smith, a Romanist such as Joe Biden will always face a choice between obeying the Constitution and obeying the pope.  It is not, as some claim, anti-Catholic bigotry to point this out.  It is a logical conclusion based upon the clear and systematic teaching of Rome herself.   

That American Protestants in A.D. 2020 by and large do not recognize the serious threat a Roman Catholic president poses to their Constitutional liberties speaks volumes about their lack of knowledge both of Scripture and of the history of Rome herself.

It is almost as if the salt has lost its savor, become worthless, and is waiting to be trodden underfoot by men.  

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