James Akin - The Salvation Controversy

Good crystal gives off an unmistakable sound. If you strike it lightly with your forefinger, youll hear the delicate ping that indicates: This is genuine; this is the real thing. But if the glass in your hand fails to make the telltale sound, you know that youre holding, at best, a glittering fake.

Something analogous happens in the world of the intellect. There are times when you just know, as if by instinct, and often before youre able to say exactly why, that an argument youre hearing is fatally flawed; it gives off something like the hollow thunk of cheap glass. But then there are those rare and precious times when you read a book or an article andping!theres no mistaking: This is the real thing. At the banquet table of apologetics, James Akins The Salvation Controversy is the finest of fine crystal.

Questions relating to salvationespecially faith vs. works, but also penance, purgatory, indulgences, and free cooperation with Gods gracehave been neuralgic points in the dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. Serious people on every side have reasonably wondered whether dialogue can accomplish very much if anything, for what they have seen trumpeted as the fruit of ecumenical dialogue too often has involved falsification and betrayal of their respective traditions. This book should lay all such doubts to rest.

Mr. Akin knows and respects the Protestant tradition in which he was raised and the Catholicism he has come to embrace. He is not about to falsify either or to pretend that crucial differences do not exist. But he is also unwilling to allow theological slogans (like faith alone) to distract us from significant points of agreement or allow verbal formulae (like TULIP) to ease away the tense paradoxes of faith and freedom. His method is to follow Scripture and Tradition wherever they lead, and he is formidably equipped for the task with honesty, clarity of mind, and a superabundance of logical rigor.

In apologetical circles, Mr. Akin was long ago nicknamed TheTerminator precisely because of his logical skills and the remorseless way he can wield them. Those skills are on frequent display in The Salvation Controversy. Though the sharp blade of dialectic is always tempered with charity, it still cuts straight and deep. So, readers, be warned: Some cherished theological nostrums may be reduced to a mass of tatters by the time Mr. Akin is finished with them.

Here I include myself among the bereaved. For many years Itoyed with a certain interpretation of the meaning in Romans ofworks. Then I read Mr. Akins chapter on Faith, Works, andBoasting. Few things in philosophy or theology deserve to be called definitive, but the argument of that chapter is surely a plausible candidate. At the very least it is a powerfully compelling case for one view of Pauline soteriology, and it demands a serious response from anyone who might hope to hold a different view.

That, in fact, could be said of this book as a whole. It is a serious work by a serious and supremely gifted apologist on a topic of central concern for everyone. If it elicits the response it deserves, then all of us, whatever our confessional commitments, will at least be clearer about what really does divide us. And what does not. Some notions, after all, deserve to be terminated.

Ronald K. Tacelli, S.J.

Boston College