Credo House Ministries: Are Roman Catholics Saved?

This afternoon, I saw a link to the above article on the Twitter feed of Jennifer Fulweiler of ConversionDiary.Com. My first thought was “oh great… another Catholic vs. Protestant catfight”, especially after reading that the author doesn’t know if some of the people who attend his church are even Christians and seeing the Evangelical vs. Fundamentalist jokes at the beginning.

Then I saw the words baptismal regeneration and thought “well crap… it’s some uber-Reformed person shooting their mouth off” so I decided to go to the “who we are” page and read up on them. It turns out that it’s some people whose theological education is from Dallas Theological Seminary (actually a good seminary) who apparently failed to pay attention in their Church History classes because they seem to be ignorant (willfully or not) of the traditions of historical Christianity.

-Yes, Catholics do indeed know who Jesus is.

-They know that they are saved by grace through faith. (I have a copy of the “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” sitting in my living room.)

-They do not add books to the Bible — Luther subtracted. (The extras, the Apocrypha, essentially cover the time between the testaments and were taken out of the canon as they had nothing to do with Jesus.)

-They would argue that it does say in James that “faith without works is dead”. Most who are literate in their faith understand that their faith in Christ saves them and that the works are the fruit of their faith.

I’m not going to argue their views on Mary and the saints as it does not pertain to this subject and those are arguments for another time, should I choose to have them. The important thing here is to establish that Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants are all Christians, we all pray to the same God, and we all love Jesus. Asking the question of whether one group is saved over another is in bad taste and serves to drive people away from faith in God more than it brings them to it.