(Part Six)

(Adapted from chapter one of ‘Recent Trends Among Evangelicals’ by Rowland C.Croucher, John Mark Ministries 1986/1995.

Evangelicals and Catholics

Nowhere has this increasingly irenic spirit been more evident than in the growing accord between Protestant evangelicals and our Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters. On several occasions, for example, at the World Council of Churches’ Assembly at Nairobi (1975) the Orthodox bishops spoke in strong, affirmative tones regarding the Lausanne Congress and its Covenant. Several evangelical organisations (Young Life, World Vision) have Catholics on their staff – sometimes in quite senior positions. In 1983, the Fuller Seminary’s annual convocation at San Diego featured several Catholics among its plenary and seminar speakers. (I heard the Catholic bishop who is in charge of all overseas missions for the US state that the three most exciting things to happen in his church in the last ten years – the burgeoning of the Cursillo movement, the charismatic renewal and Bible reading among the laity – were all opposed by the bishops!)

Who would have thought just a decade ago that most Protestant clergy and seminary students would be reading privately such popular Catholic writers as Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Mark Link and John Powell, and be reading Michael Quoist’s prayers in their services? I even heard recently of a Catholic preaching in an Australian Brethren Assembly’s ‘gospel meeting’! For Billy Graham, from his increasingly ecumenical perspective, evangelicalism can be experienced in a variety of settings – including the Vatican.

‘When I hear the Pope plead, “Come to Christ, come to Christ,”‘ Graham says, ‘he sounds like me when I invite people to make a decision for Christ’ (‘Newsweek’, April 26, 1982). Members of Sydney’s Roman Catholic churches were trained as counsellors at the 1979 Billy Graham crusade in that city and people could be referred to Catholic churches if they so chose. A few months earlier, Graham had received an honorary doctorate from a Roman Catholic college. In India, the Catholic Archbishop of Hyderabad was elected chairman of the Billy Graham crusade executive. Graham admits he has become ‘far more tolerant of other kinds of Christians… I used to play God, but I can’t do that any more.’

Of course, this increasing accord is the result of Catholics moving towards evangelicals as fast, if not faster, than is happening in the opposite direction. Before Vatican II, only those within the Roman Catholic Church were considered to be within God’s grace. (Perhaps some post-Vatican II theology has become too universalistic, teaching that everyone is saved.) The charismatic renewal within the Catholic Church has had widespread effects since its birth at Duquesne and Notre Dame universities in the 1960s. Hundreds of thousands of Catholics around the world have committed themselves to full personal trust in Christ through the renewal movement and for that we must all praise God.

Evangelical theologian Bruce Nicholls has noted [source unknown at this stage]:

I have often found in ecumenical theological conferences in India that Roman Catholic theologians and the few evangelicals attending have stood together on the fundamentals of the faith… against our radical or liberal Protestants… What would you do if a thoroughly converted Roman Catholic priest wanted to join the Evangelical Alliance?

Another relevant dimension was expressed in the 1977 ‘Chicago Call: An Appeal to Evangelicals’:

We decry the poverty of sacramental understanding among evangelicals. This is largely due to the loss of our continuity with the teaching of many of the Fathers and Reformers and results in the deterioration of sacramental life in our churches. Also, the failure to appreciate the sacramental nature of God’s activity in the world often leads us to disregard the sacredness of daily living.

Hence the increasing numbers of Protestants attending Catholic retreats!

Evangelicals will be watching with interest the burgeoning Basic Christian Communities movement in Latin America and Africa among Catholics. Although this movement is a concomitant of the dearth of priests in these places, it seems to have captured the imagination of local Catholics, particularly in Latin America. (In Africa, it suffered from being ‘imposed from above’.) Families coming together to worship, care for one another, read the scriptures and pray in the absense of a priest has not happened very much in the Catholic Church for a millennium and a half. Exciting!

We must add two important footnotes to this discussion of evangelicals’ relationships with other Christians:

1. Although we can agree with James Barr in ‘Fundamentalism’ that ‘conservatives have been on the whole a remarkably quarrelsome segment of Christendom’, the remedy for this is not to espouse a kind of eclecticism which is so open to everything that it affirms nothing. We are not calling simply for an aggregate of various Christian views – certainly not for a kind of open-mindedness which is simply a function of keeping up with the theologically respectable Joneses. As Frank Gaebelein once said, the trouble with philosophical and theological eclecticism is that it is liable to become invertebrate.

However, we deplore the kind of rigid identification with time- honoured interpretations that elevates partisan beliefs to a kind of immutable canonicity. We must encourage humility and teachableness, submitting even our own evangelical traditions to the authority of scripture. So we call for a combination of fixity and flexibility, conservativism and radicalism, firmness and openness.

One of the saddest slogans any church can espouse is semper eadem: ‘always the same’. And one of the saddest attitudes an evangelical can espouse is so to emphasise one small corner of the ‘truth’ that love is absent. Perhaps the worst depths a conservative preacher can descend to is to preach about hell without ‘tears in his voice’, as if he were glad the ungodly were going there. We ‘speak the truth in love’, but the greatest of these is…

2. The older ecumenical passion for organic unity between various Christian communions is probably still a non-issue for most evangelicals. This stems from our distrust of monolithic bureaucracies which larger groups, of any kind, inevitably spawn. It also has been a lesson from recent ecumenical history that such organic unions seem to have been consummated on the basis of the least of common denominators: the resultant unions have been usually ‘infertile’ to some degree.

Which ‘united’ church denominations in the Western world are growing? Can you think of one? Another by-product of the passion for organic unity is the terrible waste of time and human resources in its birthing. Leaders in one of these exercises have told me a ‘whole decade was lost in our churches’ through all the wrangling and constitutionalising of the process.

However, we must hasten to affirm that our denominationalism and apparent divisiveness is a scandal in the world and something creative ought to be done about that.

More…

Shalom! Rowland Croucher