Further Comments on "Another Thing Needful"

I went back and re-read Carl Trueman's post, and with each reading, I tend to get even more agitated. Trueman is correct that the modern hodge podge of evangelicalism typically has no idea what to do with Romanism. Because of their usual disdain for Reformed theology, they wind up with stuff like Geisler's "Rome is a true church with significant error" or they ignore Rome altogether, and then wonder why their friends end up converting to Romanism.

In this generation, official Roman dogma has been responded to by a handful of Godly men including Dr. White, David King, Eric Svendsen, William Webster, to name but a few. In previous generations, a host of other older Reformed sources have done so as well. God out of his mercy raises up men who exhort us to recall that our differences with Rome boil down to sola fide and sola scriptura. Rome has not changed on her denial of these basic truths. Her theologians may play around with them. Her theologians may try to dress these denials up in new clothes. But the devilish dogmas of Romanism remain consistently against the sole infallible authority of the Scriptures and the pure gospel.

The authors I mentioned above have also engaged Rome's defenders. Each generation will produce Romanist sirens who attempt to woo sheep over to Rome. Anyone who has read through Pastor King's footnotes in his Holy Scripture book realizes he simply doesn't engage Rome's pop apologists (Sungenis, Madrid, etc.).  King also went up the Romanist food chain and dealt with statements from their more "official" theologians. He still continues to do this.

What agitates me about Trueman's blog post is that he seems completely unaware that there have been men in this generation who have done a tremendous amount of work in refuting both Rome's dogmas and apologists. I'm fairly confident though that Carl Trueman has some of the contemporary books by the authors mentioned above. Did he read them? I have no idea. He says, "We need a thoughtful, learned, respectful, confessional Protestant book on Roman Catholicism." I can't help but wonder if Dr. Trueman is simply being an intellectual snob. Maybe there's no "thoughtful, learned, respectful, confessional Protestant book" because the materials available come from a baptist (Dr. White), or from books published personally by pastors (Webster / King). I hear Trueman saying in effect, "We intellectuals need to put out books engaging Romanism. Until we do it, no one has."

Trueman says, "Küng and Benedict represent in many ways the two possible paths of Roman Catholicism into the future. These men are substantial, worthy of sophisticated engagement." I have a feeling that even if White, Svendsen, King, etc. were to write books interacting with Küng or Benedict,  I wonder if Trueman would still maintain a "thoughtful, learned, respectful, confessional Protestant book" was needed.

I have though come up with a plan for Dr. Trueman. Rather than help the evangelical world by writing a definitive book on Romanism, perhaps it would be best to figure out why a few WTS folks have ended up in Romanism or Eastern Orthodoxy. He could start by challenging these WTS folks gone Romanist to public debate. His choices? Robert Sungenis, Gerry Matatics, Kenneth Howell, Paul A. Sauer, Albert Scharbach, or Taylor Marshall, to name a few (these are the ones at least a basic Google search will reveal, there are probably others). Then maybe he could mold some of the WTS curriculum to address issues involving Romanism from the outcome of these debates.