“I don’t watch your show, but I read some stuff about you.”

That sure sounds familiar from my experience in certain theological (cough) “discussions.”

OK, I realize this is a know-nothing comment, but compared to my stuff on icons, it should be rather painless: Richard John Neuhaus grants Carl Trueman’s point that there is “ecclesial assymetry” between Evangelical and Roman Catholic participants in conferences/symposia. Here is the salient quotation from Trueman:

at the outset, we have an institutional church, with clearly defined authority structures, creeds, and an identifiable history – in other words, a self-conscious identity – being discussed in relation to a movement which lacks all of these things and is really only unified by a somewhat nebulous and ill-defined field of family resemblances – and family resemblances which have, over the years, become increasingly vague. This is at its most obvious, and acute, in the Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) discussions. In these, while both groups of participants were arguably self-appointed, the Catholics did at least stand as representatives of a church and knew for whom and for what they stood; whom exactly were the evangelicals representing? From their very inception, therefore, the ECT discussions were built upon an important category mistake: Catholics came to the table committed by church affiliation to a clear set of doctrinal principles; that commitment gave them a place to stand from which they could engage. The evangelicals had no such thing, no place to stand, nowhere from which to engage. This probably goes a long way to explaining the fact that, in terms of doctrinal agreement, the discussions appeared to achieve so much but actually did little more than demonstrate the “mere Christianity” perspective to which an eclectic, parachurch movement like evangelicalism inevitably tends; and thus they exposed the inability of such a movement to be truly distinctive when faced with a coherent, comprehensive, and self-conscious church body.

I know I am ignorant of many things regarding contemporary and historic Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, I confidently declare: the idea that Roman Catholicism is “a coherent, comprehensive, and self-conscious church body” is totally hallucinatory. It is laughable.

The simple fact is that ECT involved a tiny number of catholics who are not representative of a great many Roman Catholics. One need only browse the pages of First Things and ask when are they not engaged in an “in house” struggle with other Roman Catholic office-holders over basic theological commitments. The fact is that all these Evangelicals were probably members of organizations that would not tolerate the theological diversity that exists within the Roman Catholic fold. I don’t blame the Roman Catholics for this. When the PCA spreads over five continents with millions upon millions of members I will have some basis for making claims about what sort of uniformity such a body should be able to maintain in her ranks. I judge no one in all of this. I simply point out the fact that there is nothing coherent, comprehensive, nor self-conscious about the Roman Catholic Church that has anything to do ith “a clear set of doctrinal principles.”

Frankly, there almost seems to be a sort of Protestant Romanticism that undermines Protestant confidence. We allow certain segments of the Roman Catholic Church to portray her as some sort of cohesive force in the world; we ignore the fact that she is as fractured in commitments and beliefs as any survey of Protestant denominations, and we end up making any Christian who longs for Church unity at all start longing for Rome. I have had to deal with this sort of wishful dream in practical pastoral situtations and much of it came from ultra Protestant quarters. Even ultra anti-catholicism can foster this sort of willingness to defect because, in making out the Roman Catholic Church as a dangerous foe, she gets portrayed as possessing supernatural unity. As soon as a shadow of doubt creeps in about the values one ought to hold, all the anti-catholic propaganda ends up dovetailing with the message of Scott Hahn.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor at Reformation21 blog

Though less than a month since Mike Hyatt editorialized about the digital dissolution of traditional book publishing, he has needed to write several updates. Here is the latest: Sony has developed a new technology and is planning an online store to be for text what itunes is for Google.

Over at Jesus Creed Scot McKnight (with a name like that, how can he not be Presbyterian?) has begun review entries on this book: The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, And Other Modern Maladies. Looks really good! I’m tempted to get it fast so I can mention it in my forthcoming revew of D. G. Hart’s John Williamson Nevin: High-Church Calvinist (a book in P&R’s new American Reformed Biographies series).

Anyone out there read The Great Giveaway?