After reading about your credentials, I almost feel I should be addressing you as “Father”. I am an 1970 graduate of Seton Hall University, and its prep school, and I won the religion award when I graduated Sacred Heart of Jesus parochial school in Irvington NJ, now defunct. In my senior year of college, I took a course titled “the Spirit of Protestantism” to get a general idea of what “the other side” looked like and it was taught by a Protestant minister while at the Catholic college.
I had always been curious about the argument on the topic addressed here and I learned a little more. But I really thought that Pope John Paul II had changed the church’s understanding from faith and good works to simply faith after long discussions with Dutch theologians and Catholic theologians. I saw a front page headlined news article about this in the New York Times so I am not delusional. A retired priest said the Catholic Church and Luther were so antagonistic in their historic era that even if Luther had said the sky was blue, the Church might have disputed that.
when I took the course on Protestant theology, when we came to this topic, it was explained verbally and in the textbook following the course’s name that Protestant did believe works had to follow faith or else a person’s faith would be dead and lifeless. Anyway, to me as a college student, the argument seemed to be like which came first the chicken or the egg. But I say that not to belittle the theological differences but to show that it did not seem crucial to understand either interpretation. When I read the New York Times article and heard changes announced in Catholic Church, I thought this argument was resolved, only with regard to faith. I did not know Luther inserted the word “alone” after faith, but perhaps only to make his point clear.
It sounds to me that the church abandoning its position of “faith and good works” to simply faith (without the word alone) pretty well narrowed the differences involved between Catholicism and Protestantism, and we people only wish they could have come to this before the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War that followed the reformation. Bob of Portland OR

Mojo, when you refer to Catholic apologists as being up to their old tricks you betray a lack of good will and a hermeneutic of suspicion instead of a making a rational, well reasoned argument. No need for bombast to have a good argument. Thanks.

Please reply back as I’m looking to create my own blog and want to learn where you got this from or what the theme is called. Kudos!