Sunday, September 24, 2017

Luther, Pp. Francis, and Marriage

The below-mentioned "third volley" in the Catholic Church's civil war is loaded into ScribD here.  The authors mention that Pp. Francis' admiration for Martin Luther, an arch-heretic, is a problem.

...he was intelligent and took some steps forward justifying, and because he did this [sic]. And today Lutherans and Catholics, Protestants, all of us agree on the doctrine of justification...

Thus spake Francis in June, 2016.  The assertion about justification is wrong.

More:

...We notice here, as in several other parts of this Apostolic Exhortation, a close relationship with Luther’s disparagement of marriage. For the German revolutionary, the Catholic conception of a sacrament as effective ex opere operato , in an allegedly ‘mechanical’ way, is unacceptable. Although he maintains the distinction of signum et res , after 1520, with The Babylonian Captivity of the Church , he no longer applies it to marriage. 

Luther denies that marriage has any reference to sacramentality, on the grounds that we nowhere read in the Bible that the man who marries a woman receives a grace of God, and that neither do we read anywhere that marriage was instituted by God to be a sign of anything. He claimed that marriage is a mere symbol, adding that although it can represent the union of Christ with the Church, such figures and allegories are not sacraments in the sense we use the term ...



In fact, Luther bifurcated marriage, referring to both 'spiritual' and 'worldly' laws governing it.  Then he justified re-"marriage" after divorce as a 'remedy for concupiscence,' ignoring the fact that concupiscence per se is NOT sin.   The problem here is that Pp. Francis' work (AL) on the topic parallel's Luther's concepts almost precisely.  So who's the Lutheran here?

About that 'justification' thing:

...The gospel does not teach that all sins will in fact be forgiven, nor that Christ alone experienced the ‘judgement’ or justice of God, leaving only mercy for the rest of mankind. While there is a ‘vicarious suffering’ of our Lord in order to expiate our sins, there is not a ‘vicarious punishment’, for Christ was made “sin for us” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:21) and not a sinner.  

Out of divine love, and not as the object of God’s wrath, Christ offered the supreme sacrifice of salvation to reconcile us with God, taking upon himself only the consequences of our sins (cf. Gal. 3:13). Hence, so that we may be justified and saved, it is not sufficient to have faith that our sins have been removed by a supposed vicarious punishment; our justification lies in a conformity to our Saviour achieved by that faith which works through charity (cf. Gal. 5:6)...


In other words, both faith AND works.  Remove 'works' and you have Lutheranism's "justification."



This is an ugly mess.  Pray for the Pope.




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