One more time with Beckwith ...

He says some interesting things in this recent CT interview, emphasis all mine:

Emphasis on the written word comes from my evangelical background¹—that is, when I read these things, I'm really interested in what the text is saying.

[A]fter reading the Apostles' Creed, I turned to my wife and I said, "You know, there are only two proper names in the creed²—Pontius Pilate and Virgin Mary. I don't know if anyone's ever noticed that."

The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue—not because virtue saves you, but because that's the way God's grace gets manifested. As an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn't have a good enough incentive to do so. Now there's a kind of theological framework, and it doesn't say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something. It's important to allow the grace of God to be exercised through your actions.

[W]hat matters is the sort of person I become by allowing God's grace to work through my obeying his commandments and taking the sacraments.

[T]he Reformation only makes sense against the backdrop of a tradition that was already there. Calvin and Luther did not go back and re-write Nicea. They took it for granted.

Some of the folks who have read my blog post on my return to the church have misunderstood my reading of the church fathers. They think I went back and tried to find theology, and that really wasn't it for me. It was the practices of the church that were more important. I did some research years ago on the relationship of Greek philosophy³ and the Christian doctrine of God, and that was very helpful. But that's when I first began reading the fathers. One finds the practice of penance very early on during the times in which Christians were being persecuted. Some of the Christians who had denied their faith had to publicly repent for their sins and suffer penance. This was considered to be perfectly consistent with a doctrine of faith.

I underestimated the deep divisions that were still there, at least among lay evangelicals and Catholics.

The book that was very helpful to me was Mark Noll's Is the Reformation Over? That's what led me to read the Joint Declaration on Justification. [I]f you hold to a highly cognitive, almost legal model of justification, there is no component for God's grace working out salvation within you.

At some point, there has to be some connection between the church and its role and the phenomenon of Scripture.

That is what you often find in real strong Calvinist views of God's moral nature, that things ought to be obeyed because God says so, not because he's good. In a weird way, there's an assumption that all authority is authoritarian. I deny that assumption.

¹ Hey, I adore the written word, too!
² "Jesus" is a proper name, but, yeah, plenty o' people have noticed, especially Pilate's.
³ In this post, I offer my suspicion that it was philosophy that brought Beckwith back.

If you have not read CT much, you can't possible know their indefatigably condescending attitude towards non-evangelicism. This question put to Beckwith typifies it: "What can an evangelical learn from the great tradition without giving up the genius of evangelicalism?" Oh, please!