The book above by evangelical Protestants Mark A. Noll (a Presbyterian elder and former Wheaton College professor) and Carolyn Nystrom has received attention and appreciation by both evangelical Protestants and Catholics since it was released in 2005.

The review below adds valuable insight to the authors' perspective from a newly converted Catholic who spent decades pondering the same issues.

Review by Mr. Jan P. Dennis 

Reviewer:

J. Dennis "Longboard jazzer" (Monument, CO USA) - See all his reviews     7/23/05

One is tempted to just say . . .       Yes.

That's the simple, if too glib, answer. And the authors, who have taken a good deal of time and care to carefully examine the question, deserve a better response than that. Still, as a former Protestant Evangelical who entered the Catholic Church on the Easter Vigil of 2005, that's the conclusion I came to.

I came to the Catholic Church because I arrived at the point where I could affirm her self-understanding. This came about through a thirty-year process where I looked at the questions dividing Evangelicalism and Catholicism from the point of view of history, theology, and practice. Since Mark Noll is a historian, he seems especially attuned to the strength of the Catholic position, and the weakness of the Evangelical position, vis-à-vis history. Anyone who looks closely at the history of the Church in the first few centuries following Christ's resurrection will see clearly that it very early on takes on a Catholic appearance. From Clement of Rome through Ignatius of Antioch through Polycarp through Justin Martyr through Irenaeus--that is, from about the end of the first century through the end of the second century--the Church increasingly comes to resemble its present shape, in its structure, ecclesiology, liturgy, theology, and sacramental understanding. This is so clearly established that no one, except Protestant liberals like Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman, questions it anymore. The difficulty for Protestant Evangelicals is that they accept the theological developments but not the structural, ecclesiological, liturgical, and sacramental developments. The question arises, why accept the one and reject the others? How is it that the same Church that is developing proper Trinitarian and Christological understandings, as well as determining the canon of Scripture, can be right in the one area and wrong in the other areas? What principal is at work here? The problem with Protestantism is that there are no historical antecedents for it. That is, it can't be shown to have existed before the 16th century. The question then arises, If Protestantism is true, why did it take the Church 1500 years to find it out? For some strange reason, Protestants seem to have seldom asked themselves this question. Indeed, as recently as 1953 we have the noted Protestant theologian and historian Oscar Cullman writing: "We, on the Protestant side, are beginning to understand the immense wealth that is contained in the writing of the Church Fathers and are beginning to rid ourselves of that strange conception of the Church's history that claims that, with the exception of a few sects, there was a total eclipse of the Gospel between the second and sixteenth centuries." The remarkable thing to me about this quote is that it acknowledges that it took Protestantism 400 years to discover it had no heritage, except the writings of the Catholic Church, which it initially rejected.

On the theological side, N. T. Wright (along with Ed Sanders and Ben Meyer) has definitively shown in What St. Paul Really Said and in The Climax of the Covenant that Paul can't be made to have said what the Reformers said he said, namely, that Justification should primarily be understood as the divine imputation of Christ's righteousness to the sinner, taking place under some heavenly juridical circumstances. Indeed, as Noll acknowledges, Protestants are coming to understand the difficulties in sustaining a Reformed understanding of Justification, just as they are coming to realize that Catholics have always affirmed that it is God who Justifies sinners. The dispute really hasn't been about Justification as much as it has been about what Faith means. For Protestants, Faith has traditionally meant assent to the Gospel message; for Catholics, Faith has meant not only assent to the Gospel message but also entrance into the Body of Christ and faithfulness to it and its Head, Jesus Christ. From a Catholic perspective, it appears that the authors have a fairly adequate understanding both of the Catholic position and what still prevents full acceptance of it by Evangelicals, but they seem insufficiently aware of the erosion to the classic Protestant position that has occurred as a consequence of the work of Wright and as a result of a better formulation of the Catholic position by its theologians.

The authors do seem to have grasped the idea that what most deeply and significantly divides Protestant Evangelicals and Catholics is a different concept of the Church. But even here, I'm not sure they've really put their finger on it. For a Catholic, the unvarying record of Scripture and early Church writings establishes beyond a doubt that Jesus Christ intended not only to establish the Church as a visible, institutional continuation of his ministry, but passed on to it some of the divine prerogatives of his ministry (always, it must be remembered, acting in His name, He Himself being the Real Minister), such as the keys, the forgiveness of sins, and the consecration of the Eucharistic gifts. Protestants do not believe the Church has been given such prerogatives, nor do they believe it was established by Christ, despite the fact that Catholic understandings about the Church, its structure, sacraments, and ministry arose very early and without dispute within the Church itself. For a Protestant the Church is a consequence of the believer's Justification by God by divine decree. It is the fellowship of all those who share this experience of Justification. The problem with this position is that it reduces Christianity to a theory of how Atonement works. The Catholic position, on the other hand, is rooted in an understanding that Christianity is the coming to fruition of God's eternal plan worked out in history in the person of Jesus Christ and continued in his divine/historical Body, the Church.

Historian Jarislav Pelican
Some additional insight on early Church history and how the Early Church knew itself and knew doctrine comes from a passage from renowned historian Jarislav Pelican's text: The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (100-600).

Jarislav writes: "The apostolic tradition was a public tradition: the apostles had not taught one set of doctrines in secret and another in the open, suppressing a portion of their tradition to be transmitted through a special succession to the Gnostic elite. so palpable was this apostolic tradition that even if the apostles had not left behind the Scriptures to serve as normative evidence of their doctrine, the church would still be in a position to follow "the structure of the tradition which they handed on to those whom they committed the church.

"This was, in fact, what the church was doing in those barbarian territories where believers did not have access to the written deposit, but still guarded the ancient tradition of the apostles, summarized in the creed, or, at least, in a very creedlike statement of the content of apostolic tradition."

Note to readers: If you own the Pelican book, other relevant passages include:

p. 121-122: the section on "The Faith of the Church Catholic"

p. 155: the section on "The Church and the Means of Grace"

p. 159-160: This section demonstrates that for the Early Church, church unity meant being in communion with the bishops in apostolic succession. Bishop=unity. Jarislav points out that Ignatius of Antioch (a bishop himself) used the noun "unity"  11 times and the verb "unity" six times.

Wall Street Journal

Relevant also is this Wall Street Journal article on the opinion page of 12/9/05, which describes a Church of England bishop who now contends that Martin Luther "misread St. Paul on the subject of justification by faith."

The article is indicative of a growing movement within Protestantism to reexamine St. Paul's writings from the perspective of first-century writings and history rather than through Luther's eyes in the 16th century.

Another Reformed Scholar delves deeper into first-century St. Paul

New Testament Scholar N.T. Wright, one of the top Protestant scholars today, has also been devoting much time to studying Pauline Theology from the perspective of Apostolic times. The result has been his book: What Saint Paul Really Said. N.T. Wright is an Anglican bishop who has described himself as being of the Calvinist, Reformed tradition.

Can Scripture Interpretation be done in Isolation from the Inheritance of the Church?

Along these lines, Old Zhou recently pointed out on Amy Welborn's renowned blog: "Actually, I firmly believe that any serious student of Church History (integral Church history, not just Early Church and Fathers and Reformation and Later...skipping over the Middle), will have to admit that the Roman Catholic Church is The Church in the West, the one that gave us Scripture and Worship and Doctrine and Music, and that, on the whole, the mistakes of the Catholic Church are not worse than the mistakes of the Protestant Churches . . . Evangelical Protestantism, especially in the US, was/is really only able to thrive in an a-historical environment, in sort of the mystical, Wesleyan, pentecostal model. When you just have Scripture and Holy Spirit, you can be very independent and thumb your nose at the Catholic Church. Learning Church History changes that.

Who knows what the early Christians were like?

To be fair, one might note that the average Sunday Catholic of my generation is no more likely than the average Protestant of today to be steeped in early Church history. The average Christian of either background has not waded deeply in the mechanics of how the early Body of Christians functioned, how it worshipped, how it defined unity or how it defined "Church." To the average Christian, it is not obvious that Apostolic succession was a "non-negotiable" of the Early Church, nor does it dawn on most Christians that the entire Christian community was once defined by the Sacrifice of the Mass (at least for the first 1,600 years of Christianity).

Nor does it come up in many casual chats that all Christians of the first millennia of Christianity - including the most brilliant Early Church Fathers  - would have been unfamiliar with, and quite frankly, shocked at, any suggestion that a Christian could not lose one's salvation. If St. Augustine had known that certain former priests would introduce such an idea in the 16th century, he would have left them a memo! Truthfully, this 4th century Church Doctor did leave thousands of pages of writings that make it clear not only that he personally embraced a theology which could not allow for such an idea, but that he was in union with the Church universal, which had always rejected such thinking.

When one does embark on that historical journey down Church lane, they will realize that the early Christians were Catholic, respecting an authoritative Church whose authority was universally known by all Christians of the time to be divinely ordained (Mt 16:18-19, Mt 18:17-18).

They will realize that these early Christians maintained - at all cost -- unity with the bishops who were in direct lines of succession from the Apostles. The record shows these early Christians knew their bishops to be true inheritors of the Apostles' true teachings, and they further recognized a special bishop in the line of succession from Peter - this special bishop was known to have inherited Peter's keys. From Peter to Linus to Anacletus to Clement  these were passed down the line . . . today they belong to Pope Benedict XVI.

Early Church Father Quotes      The Early Church Fathers vs. the Protestant Claim

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