Category Archives: Protestantism

The Logic of Institutional Perdurance

Posted by on October 26, 2009 11 comments

Brad has a post up responding the rash of discussion about the latest development between Rome and Canterbury regarding the future of Anglo-Catholics. The question he raises is whether or not Protestants have good reasons for desiring the perpetual existence of their denominational and institutional structures at all.

Certainly a worthy point. However, I think all of this hints towards a bigger ecclesiological question: Is the desire for perpetual institutional perdurance something that is theologically acceptable for any ecclesial tradition?

As Brad notes, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communions make the strongest claims for the necessity of their own institutional perdurance, but I don’t think that matters too much in regard to the actual theological question. Clearly any institutional structure will find its own perpetuation supremely important, so we should expect this, especially from institutions that have a very long history. It should come as no surprise to us that the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox are the most vocal proponents of the absolute theological necessity of their institutional propagation. However, the theological question is if this survivalist and protectionist mentality is what the gospel calls out and seeks to create in the scope God’s own work, in Christ and the Spirit, of transforming the world into the kingdom of God.

Obviously one could make the argument that simply by virtue of their prolonged existence, God has validated the claims of churches that make such arguments, but clearly that rests on major historiographical assumptions about the nature of God’s work in the world. This argument simply proceeds by identifying God’s work with the historical outcomes that have led to things as they currently are. In short, it rests on the assumption that God is behind the survival of a given institution simply by virtue of the fact that it has historically come to exist and remain in existence. Clearly there are some ideological problems that inhere in such a historiography, at least from my own perspective on the issue.

None of this is meant to argue that Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox are simply a bunch of survival-obsessed ecclesial bureaucrats (a very different argument would be needed to substantiate that notion). Rather it is just to say that any argument for the necessity of ecclesial institutional perdurance ought to be made from within the logic of the gospel itself, indeed, if one cannot show how the gospel requires a specific form institutional self-propagation to be required by the gospel, it seems to me that we should view all such claims with suspicion given the way in which all institutions inevitably seek self-propagation and survival.

The Authority of the Canon

Posted by on June 15, 2009 37 comments

“The classic debate between orthodox Protestantism and Tridentine Catholicism led us astray at this point. The Protestants seemed to be claiming that the authority of the Scriptures depends upon the unique miracle of inspiration (some even said “inscripturation”) whereby they came into being, which gives them timeless status above the church. That argument was circular on two counts; it did not itself explain the criteria of canonization, and the basis for the claim to inspired authority lay within the texts themselves. Catholicism served us no better by answering that the texts only have the authority which the church gave them. This is not true either, because the church which confirmed the authority of the texts, in the course of the early centuries was not the same as the first-century church which wrote them, nor was the Roman hierarchy presenting this claim in the seventeenth century. The alternative, simply stated long ago by Oscar Cullmann, is much more apt.  The development of a selection of writings, recognized as authoritative by the churches, constitutes the final proof, delivered by the church itself, that the church does not claim final authority but rather subjects herself to the witness of the apostolic age. This submission to the apostolic witness is not a statement about the event of inspiration or the uniqueness of the authorship of certain texts. It is a statement about the accountability of the Christian community as a movement within history, whose claim to be faithful to her historical origins in the midst of historical change obliges her to identify the criteria of that accountability. The affirmation of accountability is not dependent upon any theory about how the texts came to be written or selected.”

~ John Howard Yoder, To Hear the Word, 93-4. (New Edition forthcoming from Cascade Books.)

The Possibility of a Protestant Church

Posted by on June 12, 2009 7 comments

“[T]he struggle regarding the church government is actually the question necessarily emerging from church history regarding the possibility of a Protestant church for us. It is the question whether, following the separation from papal and worldly authority in the church, an ecclesial authority can be erected that is grounded in word and confession alone. If such an authority is not possible, then the final possibility of a Protestant church is gone; then there truly remains only a return to Rome or a state church or the way of isolation, into the ‘protest’ of true Protestantism against false authorities.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Eberhard Bethge, 23 January 1940, in Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 1940–1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 16, trans. Lisa E. Dahill (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 78.

H/T: Barry Harvey for pointing this quote out on Facebook

Catholics, Protestants, and Ethical Behavior

Posted by on April 3, 2009 7 comments

I certainly don’t place too much stock in Gallup polls, but this is quite interesting. According to this study, among regular church attenders, both Catholic and Protestant, almost across the board regularly attending Catholics are more likely to approve of behavior that their church deems unethical than are their Protestant counterparts.

Rod Dreher makes a rather pointed comment about the whole thing:

This is a conundrum to me, one I thought about a lot when I was a Catholic, and troubled over. Why is it that Catholics have a Pope and a Magisterium — a clear teaching authority — as well as a complex, coherent and profoundly intellectual moral theology … and yet these things, which ought to give it a tremendous advantage in maintaining the obedience of its flock, avail the Catholic Church little? It shouldn’t be that way, logically, but it is in practice.

Stats breakdown from the poll after the jump.

Read more »

Bit of Balthasar

Posted by on March 27, 2009 7 comments

“In the reciprocal relations between Protestants and Catholics, the most striking thing is that the latter ignore the former completely and no longer give them a thought: they perceive the Protestant principle as a minus of themselves, something they have clearly penetrated once and for all and have found to be too light, something that basically is not worth the trouble. By contrast, the Catholic is for Protestants an annoyance, a constant object of curiosity: they feel in him the presence of a plus that irritates them, something that they cannot get at and that consequently is always challenging them to produce a contradiction.”

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat, 125.

Bit of Balthasar

Posted by on March 21, 2009 2 comments

“The edifying principle in Protestantism rests on a process of downward leveling: before God and from the divine perspective, all human activity, all so-called religion, is nothing but idle sin and inanity. For man, the only genuine humility that saves is for him to acknowledge this and cling exclusively to God’s grace. The edifying principle in Catholicism rests on this: that the omnipotence of grace is so great that it can take into account even man’s powerless striving, and that, although God does everything, still this never happens without man.”

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat, 93.

The Coming Evangelical Collapse

Posted by on March 10, 2009 18 comments

Interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor by Michael Spencer today that I came across via Rod Drehr. He argues the bold and stark thesis that “We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.” Wow! That’s thesis for you. At least we’ll know for sure whether or not he was wrong in ten years. Here are his seven little points that form the nucleus of the article:

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to “do good” is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.

The author predicts three developments that will occur in light of this debacle. 1) There will be ongoing migration of former evangelicals into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. 2) Pentecostalism and the influence of Christianity and the global south will make missionary impact in the West and form new and different sorts of churchs. 3) There will be a significant house church movement, emphasizing discipleship and “empire subversion.”

Interesting forecast. Not without some merit, I think.

Yoder on Protestant Identity

Posted by on October 6, 2008 11 comments

“All that is sure about ‘Protestant’ identity is that it is not Roman Catholic: it does not have a pope or magisterium with theologically imperative, morally binding authority, nor a structure of confession and absolution wherewith to educate and enforce. Yet that negation is not made on behalf of a counter-patriarch or an anti-magisterium, but rather by virtue of a critical principle of appeal to the sources, which can reach unpredictably farther than those who first called themselves ‘Protestant’ dreamed.”

– John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2984), 17.

Benedictine Community and Anabaptist Ecclesiology

Posted by on October 4, 2008 8 comments

Anabaptism is unique among all ecclesial frames for reference derived from the Reformation in many ways, one of which involves its Catholic roots and specifically Benedictine roots. Unlike Luther the Augustinian, Calvin the lawyer, or Zwingli the Christian humanist, the Anabaptist tradition arose largely in the soil of the Benedictine tradition. This is seen most clearly in the influence of Michael Sattler over the Radical Reformation. The earliest Anabaptist confession, The Schletheim Confession, is widely accepted as deriving directly from the thought of Sattler, and its fundamental affirmations are clearly Benedictine in origination.

Herein lies the fundamental difference between Anabaptism the other major offspring of the Reformation, especially Lutheranism. Luther’s theology was shaped in a thoroughgoing manner by his rejection of human action and ecclesial practices as coterminous with divine action and merit. As such Luther vehemently rejected monastic profession and the Christian taking of vows. Anabaptism, by contrast never rejected the more “catholic” emphases in ecclesiology, even including the church’s ability to participate in divine action through the power of the keys in pronouncing absolution. Likewise Anabaptism did not reject the monastic (and particularly Benedictine) notion of intentional community, vows, and embodied life together.

The key point of disctinction between the Radical Reformation and its Benedictine roots came in regard to the issue of ecclesiology. For Sattler and the Anabaptist tradition as a whole, the monastic practices that originate in the Benedictine tradition are not intended simply for a monastic class within the church, but rather for all members of the church without exception. For the Anabaptists there is no salvation outside of the perfection of Christ. The “counsels of perfection” are not for a monastic caste, but rather for all believers. This is the center of the Anabaptist theology of discipleship, not a rejection of monastic practices and a catholic vision of the importance of the church as a locus of divine action, but a univeralizing and intentional ecclesializing of the monastic vision.

Sanctorum Communio: The Best Protestant Ecclesiology Ever Written

Posted by on July 10, 2008 19 comments

One of the recurring, and very significant criticisms of Protestant churches and theology involves the lacunae of an explicit and substantive ecclesiology.  While there are of course some extremely significant ecclesiological resources within the heritage of the Reformation, particularly Luther’s ecclesiology and the ecclesiology of the Radical Reformers, much of this and any continuity with the strong ecclesiology of the Roman catholic church has been lost in contemporary Protestantism.

One shining example in 20th-century theology of taking the church with absolute seriousness is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio, his first doctoral dissertation — which was approved when he was at the tender age of 21, mind you.  The book transitions nimbly between philosophy, sociology, and theology as it presents a vision of the church that is at once radically catholic and radically reformational and evangelical.  Christians from any tradition will be challenged by the seriousness and power of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology.  For him, the church is “Christ existing as church-community.”  The church itself is the very presence of Christ taking eschatological shape in the world through the Holy Spirit.  However, this should not be understood to mean that the church can understand itself as simply being institutionally identical with Christ by virtue of what the church is in herself, or a natural prolongation of the incarnation.  Rather, when Bonhoeffer claims that the church is Christ existing as community, he is claiming that the church is present only where Christ is indeed existing in the world as community.  It is not a reassurance to the church that they are where Christ is, but rather a radical challenge to the church to radical self-questioning and prayerful ecclesial self-examination.  Bonhoeffer calls into question any easy identification of ourselves and our churches with the fullness of Christ’s body by demanding that we refuse to tame our definition of the church or of Christ’s presence so as to legitimate our own ecclesial experience and practice.  In this Bonhoeffer poses a distinctive challenge both to Roman catholics and to Protestants in regard to ecclesiology.

Unlike most Protestant ecclesial understandings, for Bonhoeffer the church “is not merely a means to an end but also an end in itself.  It is the presence of Christ himself, and this is why ‘being in Christ’ and ‘being in the church-community’ is the same thing.”  However, unlike much of the emphasis in Roman catholicism which binds Christ’s presence in the church almost exclusively to the church’s office –at least for all practical purposes– for Bonhoeffer it is axiomatic that the presence of Christ as the church through the Holy Spirit takes place through the whole communion of saints as the people of God, all of whom mutually constitute one another, each person being irreducible and indispensable to the other.  Ultimately Bonhoeffer concludes that the sanctorum communio is present both in the churches of the Reformation and in the Roman church.  He takes the most difficult path, that of calling the dominant self-understandings of both Protestants and Roman catholics into question on the basis of the word of God.  And that is what we both always need.  

In my view, Bonhoeffer’s work represents the most substantive ecclesiology to ever be written by a Protestant theologian.  As such, re-engaging with Bonhoeffer’s thought will become more and more central to Protestant Christians who care about ecclesiology and ecumenism.  And similarly his contribution should be widely read by Roman catholics.  If Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology were taken seriously by various folks in the ecumenical landscape, I believe far more common ground could be found than is often the case in cross-confessional debates about ecclesiology.  Regardless of what one think of Bonhoeffer’s proposals ultimately, there is no denying that this is some of the most brilliant work on ecclesiology to be done in modern times.  Ignoring it is not an option.

The Catholic Luther

Posted by on May 2, 2008 3 comments

In contrast to the standard story, Luther advocated a manifestly high and vibrant ecclesiology, indeed an ecclesiology which is thoroughgoingly catholic and evangelical, being firmly rooted in the great tradition of the church, particularly attuned to patristic sources.

Despite the way in which the later tradition of Protestant modernity came to see the doctrine of justification by faith as elevating the interior religious experience of the individual to the center of the faith, for Luther the doctrine of justification by faith was not understood as relegating salvation to an inner transaction between the individual and God, but rather was Luther’s attempt to recover the reality of the church as that body which purely receives and only subsequently mediates salvation. As such, salvation, for Luther does not consist “only in a spiritual act that occurs in deep solitude and with full mental clarity” as Karl Heim would have it. Rather it consists in being incorporated by the Spirit into the church, the body of Christ, God’s “Christian holy people” (“On the Councils and the Church” in Selected Writings of Martin Luther 1529-1546, ed. by Theodore G. Tappert [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007], 335.) Salvation by grace alone, for Luther was not the flight of the alone to the alone, but rather induction into a people. Christian salvation, for Luther is a distinctly social reality in which participation in the life of the visible church through the Word, the Sacraments and cruciform discipleship is at the very center of the Christian mystery.

What is central here is Luther’s primary depiction of the church as God’s holy people. For Luther’s mature ecclesiology it is the reality of the church as a gathered community of saints who together live under the command of God that is soteriologically important. It is into this reality that Christians are baptized and in and through which they are sanctified (CC, 336). Luther’s emphasis on the holiness of the people of God is a correlate of Luther’s real soteriological concern that drove him throughout his life. As Yeago points out, the notion of the young Luther who suffered egregiously from a troubled conscience, longing for a gracious God is not confirmed by a close reading of Luther’s early writings. “The troubling question that emerges from the preoccupations of the young Luther’s thought is not ‘How can I get a gracious God?’ but ‘Where can I find the real God?’ All the evidence in the texts suggests that it was the threat of idolatry, not a craving for assurance of forgiveness, that troubled Luther’s conscience if anything did.” Such an evaluation accords well with the themes that come from Luther’s earlier treatises in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology and his Heidelberg Disputation in which the reality of the true God over against either the God of Aristotle and the Scholastics or a theology of the cross over against a theology of glory are the central themes.

Thus, the central ecclesiological question for Luther involved how the true church of the true God, his “Christian holy people” might be identified in the world. Luther’s dispute with the Roman hierarchy of his day was not in any sense based on a rejection of a strong notion of the church or catholicity, but rather on the conviction that the church catholic had been betrayed and duped by a corrupt ecclesiastical bureaucracy which had become apostate. The loss of the true God for which the early Luther sought had brought about the loss of the true form of the church as God’s holy people. Luther’s ecclesiology, far from subordinating the church to the individual is in fact a clarion call to return to a radically ecclesial form of life in which the central practices of the church mark and shape the lives of all Christians, for it is in and through these visible practices that, according to Luther, we are sanctified.

This is precisely the ecclesiology that Luther articulates in his treatise On the Councils and the Church. Such an ecclesiology poses a distinctive challenge both to contemporary Roman Catholic ecclesiology (which of course is to be radically distinguished from the Roman Catholic milieu of Luther’s day) and to the Free Church tradition deriving from the Radical Reformation. In engaging Luther’s ecclesiology, such a mutually critical and illuminative dialogue offers great promise to the contemporary ecclesial and ecumenical scene in which fragmentation and polarization seems to be the order of the day. Ironically enough, it may well be that the very Reformer who is alleged to have shattered Christendom into a thousand pieces may be instrumental in fostering the sort of “patient and fraternal dialogue” that is desperately needed in ecumenical discussions, both at a global and local level.

Luther: The Standard Story

Posted by on April 30, 2008 12 comments

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that throughout the ages since the Reformation Luther has tended to be viewed primarily as the harbinger of an entirely new form of Christianity, standing in radical discontinuity with all preceding Christian tradition. On the standard reading, Luther “was haunted by a question for which traditional catholic Christianity could provide no answers.” This standard narrative posits that Luther’s primary problem – for which the church dividing Reformation was the inevitable answer – “was a deep sense of the inauthenticity of our works before God; thus Luther could find no lasting peace in the edifice of catholic faith and practice, organized as it was around sacramental practice, dogmatic faith, and mystical aspiration”. Thus, on the standard reading, what precipitated the Reformation for Luther was a virtually complete revolution in the very concept of Christianity itself. It is purported that in Luther we find instantiated a new form of Christianity that came to characterize protestant modernity. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the great saint of liberal Protestantism described the matter thusly,

In so far as the Reformation was not simply a purification and reaction from abuses which had crept in, but was the origination of a distinctive form of Christian communion, the antithesis between Protestantism and Catholicism may be provisionally conceived thus: the former makes the individual’s relation to the Church dependent on his relationship to Christ, while the latter makes the individual’s relation to Christ depended on his relation to the Church.

Such notions, which Schleiermacher refrains from pushing back into the intentions and actions of the Reformers themselves have come to be a rather common sensibility among both Protestants and Catholics in regard to what was really going on with Luther and the Reformation. This has unfortunately come to be a rather common ecumenical sentiment as well, leading to an unfortunate conundrum for discussing the ecumenical implications of Luther’s theology. Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) reflects the standard narrative of Luther and Protestantism in his argument that,

…according to Luther, the church can neither assume the certain guarantee for personal salvation nor decide definitely and compellingly on matters (that is, the content) of faith. On the other hand, to the Catholic, the church is central to the act of faith itself: only by communal belief do I partake of the certainty on which I can base my life. This corresponds to the Catholic view that church and Scripture are inseparable while, in Luther, Scripture becomes an independent measure of church and tradition. This in turn raises the question of the canonicity and the unity of Scripture.

As David Yeago notes, such a reading of Luther over against his contemporary Catholic milieu renders the conflict between the Reformer and the Roman Catholic hierarchy as in effect a conflict between two “different religions.” Ecumenically, this way of telling Luther’s story is in fact “quite conservative in its effects, even though it presents Luther as a radical, because it functions as a legitimation of things as they are; it makes the present division of the church seem normal and inevitable to us.” Ironically enough both liberal Protestants and conservative Catholics find themselves attracted to the standard narration of Luther as some sort of proto-modern individualist, precisely because such a characterization allows us to avoid asking more difficult questions about what exactly Luther was really up to and whether or not those of us who stand in the tradition of the Reformation are in fact being faithful to the theological and ecclesial vision of the first Reformer.

Bonhoeffer on American Protestantism

Posted by on April 4, 2008 1 comment

“For the first generation of fugitives the journey to America was a decision of faith for their whole lives.  For them the renunciation of confessional struggle was therefore a hard-fought Christian possibility.  A danger arises here, however, for the subsequent generations, who are born into this battle-free situation without themselves having decided to spend their lives under these conditions.  Sooner or later they must misunderstand their position.  What was for their fathers a right of their Christian faith won at the risk of their lives becomes for the sons a general Christian rule.  The struggle over creed, because of which the fathers took flight, has become for the sons something which is in itself unchristian.  Absence of struggle becomes for them the normal and ideal state of Christianity.  The descendants of the fugitives grow up in a peace that is not won, but inherited.”

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Protestantism Without Reformation”, in No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures, and Notes 1928-1936 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 103. [Italics added.]

Protestants and Their View of Catholics

Posted by on April 3, 2008 12 comments

In the various Protestant-Catholic rumbles that happen on this and other blogs I often find myself wondering what view most Protestants today actually have of Roman Catholics.  When I was growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota all of my friends were Catholic except for the people I knew from the Baptist church my family was part of.  I was never raised to think that Catholics are not Christians, but just that you could never be sure.  I remember one time talking about Pope John Paul II with my Mom and her making that comment that she definitely thought he was born again.  The implication being that the born again status of a pope is certainly not something we should assume.  I also remember, at the height of the Left Behind craze, a number of evangelicals speaking out in outrage about the fact that in the book the Pope is raptured, thereby confirming his true Christian status.

My point in all of this is simply that for the most part, I think that Protestants assume that Catholics are a remnant of the church that has persisted in apostasy since the Reformation, while the real church is constituted by the various Protestant churches (they generally haven’t even heard of Eastern Orthodoxy).  My real wondering, especially for the more vocal Protestant interlocutors is what they make of Catholicism today.  I wonder, do we really just see Catholics in a way that isn’t really any different from my childhood memories of them as maybe, possibly saved, but their church as whole as some lumbering falsehood?  For myself, I cannot do other than think that Protestant, Anabaptist, Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox churches alike are all a corpus mixtum, none of them bearing any inherent lesser degrees of Christian-ness.  But I feel that for most Protestants, at least in America the same sort of basic anti-Catholic suspicion persists: maybe some are “saved”, but if you are you should get out of that apostate church!  I genuinely hope that isn’t really the case, but I fear that among the Protestant churches in America such a mindset is pretty deeply ingrained and would take a long time to unlearn.

The Protestant Identity Crisis

Posted by on April 2, 2008 42 comments

In a recent post on his blog, The Politics of the Cross, Craig Carter writes about the present “protestant identity crisis.”  In his post he poses a few key questions for evangelicals in light of the contemporary ecumenical situation.  He notes three key elements of the “ecumenical landscape” as he sees it.  First, he notes that Catholicism was saved from becoming “just another denomination” by the papacy of Pope John Paul II.  Second, he states the obvious truth that liberal protestant denominations are degenerating rapidly and more likely to be absorbed into the new age and neo-pagan religious milieu than into a united Christianity.  Thirdly, he notes that this puts evangelicals in a unique place.  They used to look to the leaders of the mainline denominations, but with that disintegrating they are looking more and more to the tradition as a whole (the Father’s, the Creed, etc.).  The most pressing question he poses for evangelicals is this:

“At some point, Evangelicals are going to have to decide if they are Protestants on-the-way-to-becoming-liberal or if they are catholics protesting the suppression of the Gospel in the church. If they choose the second option, then what are they to say in response to the pontificate of John Paul the Great, who was one of the great evangelical preachers of the twentieth century?”

The point on which Carter concludes which is, I think absolutely true is his prediction that, aside from the reunion of the Eastern and Roman communions, the most important ecumenical discourses will be had between evangelicals and Roman Catholics.

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