Frank Beckwith: Wading in the Tiber

I wanted to put together a quick video today as I've been working diligently on the Beckwith response project, for those of you who are not familiar with it. Back at the end of last year, Francis J. Beckwith, revert to Roman Catholicism, put out his book Return to Rome, and as I predicted, it plays upon his having been elected the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, why the president of the Evangelical Theological Society left his post and returned to the Catholic Church.

A group of us are writing a response going through the various claims made by Dr. Beckwith, and I wanted to read a particular portion of it because it has certainly struck me that one of the key issues we have to address, and of course it's politically incorrect to do so, but one of the key issues we have to address is the fact that there are so many people who are not Roman Catholic, but they are not Roman Catholic because of taste, not because of conviction.

Beckwith’s Return to Rome and the Problem of “Taste” Versus Conviction

I have been looking very carefully as I've been reading the book. It's not a long book, but I've been reading it very carefully. There is never any conversion story out of Roman Catholicism. There is being raised in Roman Catholicism.

There is encountering Protestants. There's liking things in Protestantism. But there's never anything that indicates that there is an understanding that the gospel is this, and Rome's gospel is this, and the two are not the same.

There is instead a lot of evidence that from Beckwith's perspective, this was always just an issue of disagreement with Rome on certain issues, but hey, we're all just part of the same family anyways.

And this is especially seen in fundamental statements made by Dr. Beckwith regarding the doctrine of solo scriptura. Let me read them to you. In the process, I get to use my CSI New York glasses. Yes, they are the exact same ones, sportcliff .com in case you're wondering, and the optics are wonderfully high quality.

I can read for hours with these without getting tired. I've noticed if you're like me and your arms are getting too short to see anymore, a lot of the cheap reading glasses you can get are just that, they're cheap.

The optics aren't good. These have really good optics, and if you're doing a lot of reading like I do, you have to switch back and forth, computers, things like that. I'm not having to look into any dead bodies with this, and if you haven't watched CSI New York, you don't know what I'm talking about anyways, but if you have, these things really do work.

Beckwith on Justification, the Eucharist, and Church Authority

Anyway, this is from page 79. Listen to what Dr. Beckwith says. Our questions, this is talking about a discussion on the subject of Roman Catholicism. Our questions focused on several theological issues that prevented us from becoming Catholic and seemed insurmountable.

The doctrine of justification, the royal presence in the Eucharist, the teaching and authority of the Church, including apostolic succession, the primacy of the Pope, and penance. Those are the big things.

Justification, though I don't get any evidence from reading this book thus far to this point, that Dr. Beckwith views this issue as Rome is so wrong about this, they fall into the anathema of Galatians 1.

The real presence in the Eucharist, yeah, it's a vitally important issue, but it's a vitally important issue because it impacts what? The doctrine of the atonement. Teaching and authority of the Church, why is that important?

Because of Sola Scriptura. And penance, yeah, important, but again, a secondary issue above foundational issues. Notice what's said here. The other issues that most Protestants find to be stumbling blocks, the Marian dogmas and purgatory, were not a big deal to me.

That was because I reasoned that if the Catholic views on Church authority, justification, the communion of saints, and the sacraments were defensible, then these other so-called stumbling blocks withered away, since the Catholic Church would in fact be God's authoritative instrument in the development of Christian doctrine.

That's certainly an argument we've heard many, many times before. And that is an observation seemingly coming straight from Carl Keating, that generally the only reason a person embraces the Marian dogmas and things like that is because they have embraced the Roman Catholic view of authority, and therefore Rome defines this fine.

So here you have this entire idea of being able to elevate Mary to the one through whom all grace accrues to mankind, and well, you know, as long as Rome's what Rome says, then that's fine. But listen to this.

One may wonder where the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, or scripture alone, factored in all this. To be blunt, it didn't. Primarily because over the years I could not find an understanding or definition of sola scriptura convincing enough that did not have to be so qualified that it seemed to be more a slogan than a standard.

Beckwith’s Weak View of Sola Scriptura

Now, there, to me, is the fundamental issue and the fundamental documentation in Frank Beckwith's own words that he never left the Tiber River. If you have not embraced the sufficiency of scripture to define the infallible rule of faith of the Church, then you are paddling around the Tiber River the whole time.

Combine this with his view on grace, the nature of man, natural law, and Frank Beckwith may have not been going to a Catholic Church for all those years, but he might as well have been. Combine that also with the reality that the churches that Beckwith speaks of going to are a potpourri of, shall we say, less than sound churches involved with during this period of time, and we start to understand what's really going on here.

You will notice a few other statements here. He tries to come up with a—he doesn't like the Westminster Confession of Faith. He says the whole idea that, according to the Westminster Confession, one may deduce necessary doctrines from scripture, treats theology as if it were a branch of mathematics.

That means he never understood what the Westminster Confession of Faith was talking about either. It's as if the Reformed scholastics were anticipating the 19th century legal formalists of whom Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would write, I once heard a very eminent judge say that he never let a decision go until he was absolutely sure that it was right.

So judicial dissent often is blamed as if it meant simply that one side or the other were not doing their sums right, and if they would take more trouble, agreement inevitably would come. A very shallow view of what Sola Scriptura is, but it also therefore demonstrates a very shallow view of scripture on the part of Beckwith, which is not unusual amongst philosophers, even those who call themselves evangelicals.

As I slowly and unconsciously moved toward Catholicism in the early 2000s—2000s, so this is almost a decade before his conversion, reversion—I began to even find the Sola Scriptura of the Magisterial Reformation not entirely satisfactory.

So he's clearly admitting that he had fundamental foundational issues, even when he was elected as president of ETS. One would highly question the use of evangelical at that point. Then on page 81, in any event, I had for some time accepted a weak form of Sola Scriptura.

Any doctrine or practice inconsistent with scripture must be rejected, though it does not fall that any doctrine or practice not explicitly stated in scripture must suffer the same fate, for the doctrine or practice may be essential to Christian orthodoxy.

So in other words, there are things essential to Christian orthodoxy not to be grounded in scripture at all. This seemed to me to be the only defensible understanding of Sola Scriptura, though it certainly left much to be desired.

And so when you start putting together everything that Beckwith says in this book, it becomes very, very clear that he was amongst the many who were paddling around, are paddling around today in the Tiber River.

Why Beckwith’s Reversion Was Theologically Predictable

Just because a person, for whatever reasons, family reasons, taste reasons, I don't like backwards collars, I don't like whatever else it might be, do not attend the Roman Catholic Church, that doesn't make you a convinced and convicted Protestant.

That does not make you one who recognizes why you believe what you believe, and you are convinced that what you believe is true. And it has become painfully obvious in reading Beckwith's book that he was one of many who for various reasons in his youth was not a part of the Roman Catholic Church, but on the fundamental issues of authority, the nature of grace, the nature of man, nature of revelation, was still a Roman Catholic.

That's what he had been raised with, that's what he'd imbibed. Even his education at a Jesuit institution, it's not overly surprising that many of the people that he idolized likewise, though not Roman Catholics, were trained at Jesuit institutions.

There is a fundamental dividing line that exists between believing that Scripture is sufficient in and of itself, and rejecting that proposition. And Frank Beckwith is very clear about saying he rejected that all along.

What does that mean about the Evangelical Theological Society? What does that mean about many people who call themselves Evangelicals today? It should not surprise anyone that Frank Beckwith reverted back to Roman Catholicism.

Those who think this is some great coup, or it has some great meaning, really should read this book and discover that all it really is saying is that someone who had a Roman Catholic foundation went back to the foundation that he had.

This was not someone who was convinced of the key issues of the Reformation, understood how those issues were, and believed that they were definitional of the faith itself. As long as you think these are just secondary issues, they're issues of taste, maybe very important to me, but they don't define the faith itself, well, then reverting back to Rome is fully understandable, in fact, I would say fully to be expected.

Why the Reformation’s Definitional Issues Still Matter

So keep an eye out for more, we're going to be working on this project for a while, putting it together, and hopefully the people of God will be blessed by an opportunity to once again consider what really is important in defining the Christian faith.

Thanks for watching.