An effusive sympathy for, but weak reproof of heretics.
Taken from his
3rd talk to New Word Alive in 2011.
(Is this perhaps why the FIEC, which commends this conference, removed
Rome from its statement on ecumenism church unity
a year later?)
On the Church
of Rome
Mike Reeves claims we should 'deeply applaud and rejoice in attempts to
foster greater Christian unity',
with reference to Rome, (@ 36.00), though he does somewhat cautiously
expose the ugly ambiguity of the treacherous compromises made in the Joint Declaration on
Justification.
No distinction between co-belligerency and ministerial recognition.
"Catholics and Protestants today routinely cooperate, routinely we lock
arms together to face as one the common enemies of
secularism, atheims, we're feeling look we've got our differences, but
we've got some foes out there that we're really at
one with together against." 17.00
Cites G K Chesterton's
apology for Romanism with unqualified approval
"When asked, 'Why did you convert to Roman Catholicism?' and here was
his main answer, 'Roman Catholicism is the only
thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of
his age.' E.g. [sic] Rome stays constant, whereas
the
Protestants just flip all over the place. I have to say I do think
that's a huge attraction for Roman Catholicism." 19.05
No qualification, no caution, no insight given as to why such a
statement is hugely misleading for a young Christian.
"So
in the 21st century things are extremely different. Roman Catholicism
has many attractions to the Protestants, and Roman Catholics and
Protestants are keen to work together." 19.35
Pauline
sentiments? 'Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any
other
gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be
accursed.'
Mark Noll
"So the question is how close are Roman Catholicism and
Evangelicalism today actually? Well, remarkably so, according to
Professor Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrum in their book 'Is the
Reformation Over?'". 20.00
He then goes on after the most sympathetic handling later to claim that
they are mistaken.
"And there are a number of really very influential Catholic
theologians, who are now today prepared to sound remarkably like
Luther, so for instance Father Joseph Fitzmyer, who is one of the top
New Testament scholars of the late 20th Century, he
wrote an absolutely magisterial commentary on Romans, and Fitzmyer in
his commentary on Romans denies that justification
is a process of becoming more and more just. A Roman Catholic top
theologian denies that justification is a process of
becoming more holy. He says, 'Justification is the righteousness of
Christ being attributed to a sinner by grace'.
Luther's jaw would be on the floor! That's what's happening." 26.00
If Fitzmyer really repudiates the Tridentine anathemas why hasn't he
been excommunicated? (or otherwise disciplined, as was Hans Küng
for his denials of papal infallibility.)
"Certainly many individual Roman Catholic theologians have changed on
this one." [on justification] 27.44
Sinclair Ferguson has a more nuanced and
perceptive grasp of the breadth of the persisting abyss between the
positions
"Even Fitzmyer's further qualification -- he notes that this
justification takes place "gratuitously through God's powerful
declaration of acquittal" -- does not eliminate a distinctively
Tridentine exegesis, as he makes clear:
'The
sinful human being is not only "declared upright," but is "made
upright" (as in 5:19), for the sinner's condition has changed.' (12)
On the New
Perspective(s) on Paul
(Phil Johnson's helpful exposure of the measure of
this heresy.)
'NT Wright is stunningly helpful'
He 'does stellar stellar stuff on so many things' 49.05
'If
you want a good understanding of the resurrection, Tom Wright is your
man - brilliant work he's done on the resurrection.' 49.10
In his summary of NT Wright's teaching Mike Reeves says,
'What Paul is really battling is not a kind of works righteousness, but
a kind of Jewish ethnic exclusivism'
He says on the Damascus road, it is not that Paul is somehow meeting
Christ and being born again, it's not that he's being
saved in that kind of sense, what's happening on the Damascus road is
suddenly he realises that Jesus is the Messiah who
has come for all peoples, therefore he should go to all peoples.
So Paul's whole mission is to bring Jew and Gentile together*, that's
what Paul is all about, Paul is about bringing Jew
and Gentile together, not really about putting faith against works.
Yeah? Not in the.. I think there's a lot of helpful
stuff there' 49.
His conclusion of this
potted summary of neo-Pauline distortion?
'I think Tom Wright is very, very helpful on that.' 50.47
He then goes on to dissociate himself from NT Wright's position on
imputation, by emphasising union with Christ.
Is
a teacher who makes such strong expressions of sympathy with and
admiration for the proponents of deadly error suitable for
training future pastors?
'Yet
is the homosexual lifestyle necessarily or really so solitary and
self-sufficient? It seems hard to accuse it of replacing relations of
alterity with those of ipseity when it is simple encounter and not
gender that is, at bottom, definitive.' (135)
'Yet is the
homosexual lifestyle necessarily or really so solitary and
self-sufficient? It seems hard to accuse it of replacing relations of
alterity with those of ipseity when it is simple encounter and not
gender that is, at bottom, definitive. On Barth's model, could not man
see his partner in some other form of fellow-man and so live in
interdependent fellowship, encountering true alterity?84 Having, even
for a moment, untied the theological anchor mooring human gender in its
actuality, Barth is immediately set adrift on the high seas of sexual
ethics in need of some other mooring (a mooring which, it has to be
said, he never did find or even seek).' (135-6)
'Footnote
84. Barth's non-limitation of relational specificity was
taken to
precisely this conclusion, to espouse nonabusive
homosexual
relations, in what has been one of the most influential works for
theological gender studies in recent decades, Derrick Sherwin Bailey's
Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (New York &
London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955)...'
'So, too, gay and
lesbian Christians need have no quarrel with the special aptness of the
Genesis account of male and female and their procreation as normative
for the species, as long as not everyone has to instantiate it to be in
God's image.' (Citing Eugene Rogers, p.243, in Sexuality and the
Christian Body). (229)
Professor
Mike Reeves is now President of Union School of Theology, a fountain of theological
instruction, with a laminated structure of errors we fear will shortly make godly
observers weep.
There is indeed a black
hole
in much Gentile Christian and Messianic understanding of the Law, and
its transformation in the Messiah, but these writers neither identify
its root nor its remedy
