Why not evangelicals too?

I used to be a regular contributor to the Catholic Community Forum. In fact that's where I honed my "debating" skills, hanging out on the apologetics forums. I wonder, sometimes, how many people who knew me back then are readers of SOV2. Though I liked the CCF, especially the moderators who were very, very good, I had a hard time controlling my temper. The "first do no harm" ideal is often hard to maintain when its the fifth or sixth or seventeenth time you have to restate the same idea.


Despite the heated arguments I had at CCF, I am very sympathetic to evangelical protestants. My brother-in-law and his wife fall into that non-denominational category. This is one of the reasons you don't see Che' or H. Robert slamming them... though of course many liberal catholics do slam them often and unfairly. It is also unfortunate that many orthodox Catholics also attack evangelicals in general in response to the hyper-zealotry of a few apologists... for example James White. But don't we have our own hyperzealots?

Yes there are wicked evangelicals. Yes there is a lot of arrogance at evangelical bible studies. There are greedy evangelicals, there are evangelicals that are dumbing down Christianity and turning it into a for-profit business. But most evangelicals I have met are not like that. In fact all those I know treat Catholics with fairness and respect - which is more than you get from the progressive people I know.

As we (Catholics and Evangelicals) are increasingly brought together by the onslaught of the secular culture you can see that the two communities are beginning to influence each other in positive ways. They are adopting more Catholic devotional ways, more Catholic approaches to things like vocation, sin. They no longer shun the church of the middle ages. They no longer consider the Pope the Antichrist. I speak in generalities here. Yes, there is still that pre-millenialism that expects Rome to be annihilated in a ball of fire; but even in there anticipation of Armageddon, they save a few places for Catholics on the bus out of town. I think that is a sign that the bitter feelings from the reformation are finally coming to an end in the face of the common threat and the disintegration of the old school protestant traditions.

We Catholics are also starting to learn from evangelicals... not exactly theology... but practice. We are more prepared, more biblically literate and more willing to talk about our faith in public. We are also learning to communicate lay person to lay person and look for areas where we can have understanding and respect for each other if not agreement.

It is not the intellectuals at Universities whose openness to differences of opinion and relativism in regards to other cultures has affected this change. It is through the pro-life movement that Catholics and Evangelicals have finally come to see each other as fellow Christians and yes Vatican II and John Paul II deserve much of the credit in fostering this authentic ecumenicism.